Broken Record Day: Afghanistan

If I’m going to say the same thing over and over again anyway, I might as well pretend it’s all part of the plan.
So I hereby create the institution of the ‘Broken Record Day’ during which I am allowed to repeat myself and go on and on about the things that really bug me.
That sorted, I might as well inform you that today is a broken record day and my subject is Afghanistan. Then again, when the subject is Afghanistan, every day is a broken record day.

Things are not going well in Afghanistan.
Things have not gone well in Afghanistan since the beginning of the operation.
Of course, there have been good days and bad days.
But on an average day it is evident that US and coalition forces are approaching this all wrong: from rotating troops out of the country pretty much the minute they are beginning to understand what’s happening on the ground; to falling prey to cheap emotional tricks like trying to befriend the local children and being drawn into ambushes; to getting caught up in regional and tribal disputes they do not understand and cannot resolve - but can exacerbate. And exacerbate them they do.

No-one is saying it’s easy.
The US troops are battling on many fronts: fighting the insurrection; trying to help Afghanistan build new institutions, structures and a new political culture; undermining these institutions, structures and culture via their very presence; fighting the drug cartels; trying to discourage poppy cultivation and encourage alternative crop cultivation whilst simultaneously trying to build the roads via which the alternative crops will be taken to market without rotting while the farmers are negotiating treacherous terrain; grappling with the centuries’ old system of feudal debt and bondage that would keep farmers bound to poppy cultivation even if viable alternatives did exist; watching their reconstruction work being undermined by their counter-insurgency fighting and their counter-insurgency fighting hampered by their reconstruction work.

It’s not easy.
But it was never going to be easy.

And now accusations are being made that US forces are failing to share counter-insurgency intelligence with their international military allies.
A report prepared by RAND and leaked to Wikileaks suggests that efforts in Afghanistan are hampered by the twin evils of US commanders being overwhelmed by information on hundreds of contradictory databases and the same commanders not comparing notes and/or sharing this information with their counterparts within the coalition.
Meanwhile much of this closely guarded intelligence is coming from local contacts that get tipped for every tip they offer, thus providing unreliable and often erroneous information that the US army then spends time and money to code, analyse, counter-reference and guard. From their own allies, among others.

The report describes a force drowning. In information. In confusion. In despair.
Having gone in without a plan.
Realising slowly that the military commanders do not understand Afghanistan with its tribal politics, deep-rooted religious entanglement and drug-fuelled economy based on debt bondage and serfdom.
And now, not seeing a way out that wouldn’t push the country over the brink into complete civil war and political disintegration, the force is drowning.

Things are not good for the US troops.
But they still need to send reports home. And ‘we are in this way over our heads’ is not a good report. Besides, you can only say it so many times.
So, it seems, the US forces have devised complex economic, military and political ‘progress indicators’ the relevance of which is shaky but the purpose clear: they allow for reports to be sent back home, for activity to be measured, for an illusion of progress to be maintained.

All the while, according to the same report, coalition forces at Camp Holland near Tarin Kowt in southern Afghanistan maintain 13 different intelligence sections as nobody is talking to anyone else.
If nothing else, the coalition is leading by example: a true inspiration for the fragmented, tribal and bitterly divided Afghan society.

Broken record day.
You cannot provide a solution to a problem you do not understand.
You cannot navigate an unknown land without a map or compass.
Good intentions and a cheery disposition suffice only if your name is Polyanna.

‘On s’engage et puis on voit’ didn’t work out all that well for Napoleon.
Why Bush thought it would work out for him beats me.

And yes, I know: ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’.
I know.
But if you start out without a plan, without even knowing what you are setting out to achieve, in general terms, it’s you that may not survive contact with the enemy. Especially if your enemy knows what he’s fighting for, and you don’t.

When looking ahead is hard, look back and look busy

For 5 points, political science:
What is the function of the US Congress?
If you answered ‘legislation’ you get 5 points. But if you answered ‘to serve as the forum in which political vendettas and ideological politics are all played out’ you also get 5 points. Because debate within Congress is partly about making laws and partly about making a point. And I can’t help thinking that the latest push towards passing a resolution that describes the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians on the run-up to and during the First World War as ‘genocide’ is little more than that. I am just not sure what the point is.
Despite placating the Armenian lobby.
Despite giving the beleaguered Armenian nation a belated moral victory.
Despite looking back and nodding wisely.
Despite all this, I fear that this gesture is just that – a gesture – a symbolic pat on the head and not the start of a global preventative initiative.

Almost a century has gone by since the Armenian massacres the proposed Congress resolution is dealing with occurred. And although the memory of the pain and the horror remains, none of the political players do.
At the time, Armenia was not yet a state.
The state that perpetrated the crimes (the Ottoman Empire) no longer exists.
The state that replaced it (Turkey) came into being partly by rebelling against and rejecting the Ottoman Empire. It has a new polity, new legal system, new language and script, new capital and no state religion. It is in all ways different to the Ottoman Empire, difference compounded by rejection when the nationalists rebelled against the Ottomans. This is not our crime, say the Turks. And nobody is actually accusing the Republic of a crime that was perpetrated before it existed. But the ‘Armenian question’ makes Turks feel put on the spot, accused, provoked to respond. And respond they do. Most vociferously. And then of course the world thinks ‘the lady doth protest too much’. And Turkey is looked at suspiciously. And the cycle continues.

So if the resolution passes, it will be castigating a country that no longer exists. It will be offending a country that is only linked to the horrors perpetrated by history and association but not institutional continuity and ‘national’ collective responsibility. And it will be giving the Armenians a nod. Nothing more. The resolution is offering no reparations, no redress and no promise that we have learnt from this particular horror, as a species. All that is offered is a piece of paper saying that the horrors endured by the Armenians a century ago were comparable to the horrors endured by the Jews during World War II.
Because that’s what the term ‘genocide’ boils down to.
Of course, it has been used since and for other cases but when Raphael Lemkin first wrote of genocide in 1944 he only had one thing in mind: to build legislation that would punish the perpetrators and avoid a repetition of the horrors of the Holocaust.

It didn’t work.
Genocide predated its name and outlived Lemkin.
But what we have had since Lemkin is a body of international law and the right language to understand, isolate, describe and – on few occasions – punish the crime that is genocide.
But this being a body of law, it all gets technical, as one of the criteria for proving a massacre constitutes genocide is that specific intent needs to be proved. The letter of the law requires a paper trail or suchlike proving that the killings are part of a sustained policy to annihilate an ethnic group as such, people being killed because they belong to that ethnic group.

Rwanda – with the extensive incendiary media coverage exhorting members of one group to kill members of another, qualifies.
The Armenian case is more complicated.
The Armenian massacres occurred before the information age. There were no media campaigns. The dissolution of the Ottoman state means that even if paper trails existed then, they no longer do. And chances are they never did as high levels of illiteracy meant that orders had to be given orally in the most part.
It was a different time. The definition does not apply. Still, the deaths occurred and the legal assessment makes them no more and no less real.

The resolution may ignore all this and call it a genocide regardless.
And yet this will offer little comfort to Armenians – only the bittersweet aftertaste of a minor and long overdue moral victory. If giving a title to suffering can be counted as a victory. Meanwhile the Turks will feel slighted and wronged. A minor diplomatic episode might ensue. But they too will get over it.

And then what?

Then we all go back home.
And if new atrocities occur, we make sure we wait a good hundred years before assessing exactly what is going on, why it is happening and just how horrible it is.
Of course time gives us perspective.
Time also ensures we don’t have to get our hands dirty in the messy business of saving lives and preventing slaughter before it becomes genocide.
Time allows for taxonomy.
Time is the enemy of survival.

I do not object to the sentiment behind this resolution.
I also appreciate the technical debate around this. I am quite fond of taxonomy. I like legal definitions and pedantic arguments.
But the US Congress is not a historical society.
For Congress this is not about a moral choice. This is a choice between looking back, looking busy or looking straight ahead.
The victim often has no choice but to look back.
The law-maker always has a choice.
Call me pedantic, but given the choice, I’d rather law-makers opted for looking ahead rather than looking back and looking busy.
Because that’s as bad as looking the other way as things actually occur.

On perky princes, pesky workers and how the story ends for the rest of us

Big news!
Prince Charles has been voted ‘Esquire’s best dressed man’. Of the year. I think. I could check, if it matters that much to you? No. I didn’t think so.
Still, you will be pleased to know, prince Charles’ sartorial success boils down to the ‘quintessentially perky British look’ (that’s the Guardian’s Simon Chilvers speaking, not me). Perky?
How can double-breasted suits be perky, you ask? What does ‘perky’ actually mean?
Well, let me help you out here.

Prince Charles’ suits are perky.
The thousands of construction workers, who’ve just seen their worst suspicions proven
true, are not perky. I’m not perky, as I read that numerous companies including Britain’s leading construction outfits have been buying personal data for decades in order to vet applicants before employing them.

So someone (to be precise, private detective, Ian Kerr who, I hope, is not perky right now) has been making a living by gathering and selling the private information of unsuspecting individuals. He has been making a living out of depriving others of theirs.
Does this break the data protection act? Sounds like it to me.
And it looks like Kerr will be investigated and possibly (read hopefully) tried for his involvement in producing ‘black lists’ that helped construction companies decide who should work. And who shouldn’t.

So thousands of people have been denied work by the major construction players because they were ‘troublesome’ and hence blacklisted.
Troublesome means ‘not perky’.
That includes ‘lazy’.
It also includes ‘union member’, ‘communist party member’ as well individuals ‘previously involved in strike action’.
Troublesome includes workers who trusted in the letter of the law and exercised their hard-earned rights to unionise and strike.

Thousands of people out of work because of their political beliefs; because they, at some point over the past thirty years, fought for better conditions, better wages, a better life. Because someone assessed their records and decreed them troublesome.
Because, someone, somewhere decided that the propensity to strike has more to do with the person than the working conditions he are forced into.

Does it remind you of anything?
McCarthyism, the juntas in southern Europe and Latin America – they kept Communists out of work. Because they were troublesome and the state – in those days, in those places – did not like trouble.
Just like the big construction companies in Britain, today. Only here the state is not actively involved. Small comforts. Especially as the result, from the construction workers’ point of view, is the same.

To the list of things that are not perky, add me.
To the list of things that are perky, add the construction companies. Who have been caught red-handed but are looking perky nonetheless because, as it stands, they may have well not broken the law.

In 1999 the Labour government got very close to banning the practice of blacklists but then decided not to implement the law in the absence of hard evidence that blacklisting was actually occurring.
So in 2009, blacklisting remains, for all intents and purposes, legal.
And although the Labour party are looking shamefaced, any change to the legislation now will not be retroactive and the construction companies will get off scot-free with a warning to not do it again and play nice.

And that's where this story ends.
It's a happy ending. For all. Not for everyone. But for all directly benefiting by the lack of blacklisting legislation, it is a happy ending.

That's the bit we keep missing, when we are told 'and they all lived happily ever after'.
Nobody ever speaks of everyone living happily ever after.

Plus ça change: Turkey 12 years on

This Saturday past marked 12 years since Turkey’s latest coup.

Twelve years is a long time. A lot can change in twelve years. And a lot has changed in Turkey, in the 12 years since the post-modern coup of Feb. 28, 1997.
It is now legal to broadcast in Kurdish, family law has been liberalised, Turkey has deepened its rapprochement with Europe and, in economic terms, the Anatolian heartland is flourishing. Even the make-up of the National Security Council has been changed to achieve increased civilian control over the army.

Things have undoubtedly changed.
In 1997, the religious Refah party was ousted by army memorandum.
Twelve years on, the AK party (openly religious and counting many ex-Refahites among its members) has been governing for the better part of a decade.
The AK party is itself proof of profound change – the secularists have changed enough to endure it and the Islamists have changed enough to join and vote for the reformist, Euro-phile AKP. Even the army are yet to take drastic action against them. And many believe that the fact that the AKP is still around is proof enough that the TSK (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, the Turkish Armed Forces) have also changed.

When the AK party was investigated for unconstitutional activities and acquitted, some hailed the end of an era. When the TSK failed to intervene as pious Abdullah Gül was elected to the revered office of the President of the Republic, some were convinced that was the end of the TSK as we knew it. Just because they did not intervene.
Are we not forgetting something?
The army didn’t get the troops out in 1997 either. But a government fell nonetheless.

The TSK has not changed since 1997.
The TSK is done changing.
Between 1960 and now, they have perfected the art of interfering without intervening. Why change any more?

The position of the TSK within the polity is clear:
Past and present versions of the constitution and the uniform code of military justice recognise the TSK's duty to protect the land, the people, the Republic and Atatürk’s legacy from enemies within or without.

So Turkey has changed. But within certain limits.
After all, protecting a legacy from enemies within clearly means that the TSK are there to block the wrong kind of change.
In fulfilling that duty, the TSK intervened once every ten years, never holding onto power for long, between the advent of multi-party democracy in 1950 and 1980 when it appeared that a more ‘lasting solution’ was needed. Thus far, the army had been intervening in a correctional manner, addressing a perceived problem swiftly and returning to barracks. It was actually widely believed that to hold onto power too long would corrupt the corps.

But in 1980 things were different. Turkey was in chaos. Basic good shortages, government failures and violence on the streets meant that this time, when the TSK intervened, they were reluctant to withdraw immediately. Or even soon.
General Kenan Evren would retain power until he has satisfied the system had been re-jigged appropriately.
That took three years.
Before returning to democratic politics he made sure he had given Turkey a new constitution, new institutions and himself as President of the Republic for the next 7 years.

Since then, the army has interfered a lot and intervened little.
Although in 1997 some tanks did leave the barracks – in the city of Sıncan, following an unfortunate incident including a fiery oratory and the Iranian ambassador – 1997 was a very civilised coup, done via communiqué rather than military action.
Since then, the TSK’s unquestionable power has been turned into diffused influence. So diffused, you can hardly see it. But that doesn’t make it less real or less potent.

Of course, it helps that the core principles of the constitution are the TSK’s guiding principles. And it also helps that the current constitution is a heavily amended version of the document the junta drafted in the early 80s.
It also helps that the TSK have a say in all high-level judicial appointments. They have influence over all high-level state university appointments as well as in a number of other areas including a number of regulatory bodies.

Of course things have changed. But plus ça change…

Granted, the TSK don’t always get their way.
Neither Erdoğan nor Gül are to their taste. And they are both still around.
But neither Erdoğan nor Gül have pushed through any particularly controversial legislation, despite numerous tense stand-offs. Somehow AKP politicians manage to reign it in before it’s too late. For instance, Erdoğan tried, early on in his first term, to criminalize adultery, yet he soon dropped the issue like the hot potato that it was. The EU saw it as a sign of respect for the Copenhagen criteria.
But the secular TSK knew better.

The EU was also pleased when the number of civilians in the National Security Council was increased and the TSK chiefs were given ‘line managers’ lower down the food chain – from the head of state to the minister of defence.
The EU stopped being so pleased when they realised that the change in the National Security Council make-up had absolutely no bearing on the Council’s decision-making patterns as the TSK’s views still carried the day and that Army chiefs carried on being treated with deference by their civilian superiors.

Turkey has changed, say the EU observers, and now it’s time for the TSK to do the same.

Look again, says me.
Turkey was Atatürk’s project: an exercise in collectivism, statism, secularism and modernisation. The project is working, the legacy is upheld and the TSK is overseeing proceedings.
Of course Turkey has changed since 1997.
Turkey has been changing since 1923. It has been changing according to Atatürk’s plan and legacy. And since 1923, the TSK has also changed, to ensure it remained best placed to protect and forward the plan.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is the plan.
The TSK made sure of that.

For Peace in Sri Lanka, Remember Bandaranaike

The war is almost over in Sri Lanka, the papers announced.
What war? People asked me.
The war.
The war that has been going on so long, many in the West have forgotten it hasn’t actually ended. The war that has claimed thousands of lives, caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose their homes and livelihoods. The war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. That war.

When did this war start?
Was it 1983 as many official histories claim? Was it 1976, when the Tamil Tigers first came into being? Was it even earlier, when the Tamils clashed with government forces in opposition to the ‘Sinhala only’ legalisation?
The legislation marginalized non-Sinhalese speakers – ostensibly to distance Ceylon from its former colonial masters but also actively reversing the ethno-linguistic make-up of the civil service (from predominantly Tamil to almost 100% Sinhalese) in under a generation and effectively marginalising the Tamil population.
But marginalisation leads to discontent and discontent leads to resistance. Those are the mathematics of conflict.

For now, the Tamil Tigers are still fighting. And although they are evidently losing, no amnesty has been declared, no foundation for peace has yet been laid. When the Tigers called on the international community – that inscrutable animal – to broker a truce, Colombo resisted and anonymous government sources said that this will end as it started: fighting.
So the beginning of the end for this war may actually be less of a promise and more of a statement of fact: the war will be over soon, because there will be no one left to fight against.

But not yet. For now, the Tigers are still fighting and the military are preparing for at least one more, final, showdown before the curtain falls on this conflict. Meanwhile the rest of the world had forgotten there was a war going on still. And if we forgot the war, what are the chances of remembering Bandaranaike?

PM Solomon Bandaranaike was the man behind the ‘Sinhala only movement’. Obviously this did not start the war. Obviously he did not start the war. But he is where the story starts. And now that the story is about to come to an end, the beginning is of the utmost importance. Now, when people least want to think back, is when the past needs to be re-examined.

Healing is what matters now, I hear you say. Rebuilding, not rehashing.
But when the time comes to rebuild, will anyone remember Bandaranaike?
Will anyone remember that the young Sri Lanka had a beautiful, pristine, Westminster-style democracy, upon independence?
That was the fruit of ‘rebuilding’ as well.
Rebuilding.
But in doing so, the new system did not protect itself against ethnic take-over. It did not create structures and systems that could protect minorities, ensuring that they could not be disenfranchised, that the tyranny of the majority would not occur.
Mistakes were made.
The system was abused.
’Sinhala only’ was launched and although opposition and some negotiation took place, Bandaranaike’s legacy held firm – in the shape of laws and a political dynasty: his wife Sirimavo Bandaranaike was three times prime mister, his daughter Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga president and son Anura Bandaranaike many times minister and speaker of the house.

Don't get me wrong.
I don’t want to reduce the legacy of a political dynasty to two words. But those two words, ‘Sinhala Only’, stand for the mind-set of an entire state apparatus - the apparatus that the Tamil Tigers rose to fight against. So all I’m saying is, remember Bandaranaike. Remember where democracy was weakest, and when rebuilding, build up there first.

If government forces crush the Tigers, defeating them completely and irrevocably, there will be victorious swagger where quiet reflection is necessary.
Of course, the victors will celebrate, the vanquished will nurse their wounds, families will heave a sigh of relief and no one will want to think back.
But if nobody remembers Bandaranaike, what are the chances of a lasting peace?

Bandaranaike demonstrated how easily democracy can crumble. How can we rebuild, without remembering Bandaranaike?

To end this, we have to go back to the beginning, to the structures that made ethnic politics possible in the first place. Now that victims and perpetrators have swapped places a number of times and every home has a personal tragedy in Sri Lanka, it’s time to go back to the beginning. Amends can’t be made. But amendments can, and the whole political machinery needs to be re-jigged with two words in mind. Not ‘Sinhala only, but ‘never again’.

The war is almost over in Sri Lanka.
And it’s time to remember that history only goes round in circles when we forget the likes of Bandaranaike, when we forget how painful stories actually began.

All together, one more time

I hate repeating myself. I hate it.
But while something remains true, it needs to be said again and again. For as long as it takes.

So.
The Greek Prime Minister was quite clear: ‘I am not thinking about elections. End of discussion’.
Well if you say so…
The most ineffectual man in European politics hath spoken.
Predictably, nobody cared. Almost simultaneously the opposition leader announced that he is ready to be judged by the people in an election that he deemed both expedient and imminent.
Mr Papandreou said it was time he measured himself against History (whatever that actually entails). In this most critical of junctures, and sounding uncannily like his dad, Mr Papandreou spoke of his financial vision, which boils down to privatising banks and getting the ‘rich to help out’.
So, to recap, the government won’t tell us what their financial plan entails (see my post Greece 2009: welcome to the dark side), the opposition’s financial salvation plan sounds like it came straight out of a 1950’s ‘socialist government’ manual while the Greek Communist Party’s response to all this was to rehabilitate Stalin. Yes that’s right. And I don’t know what’s more outrageous: the fact that they are not dealing with any of the current problems plaguing Greece but rather speaking of a man who has been dead since 1953 or that they are publicly redeeming the reputation of one of the world’s bloodiest leaders. But then again this encapsulates beautifully the general status of Greek politics: shut the windows, turn off the TV, throw away the newspapers, keep it self-referential and make sure you don’t deal in real issues.

Meanwhile, just to add to the comedy of it all, Vassili Paleokostas and Alket Rijay, serving sentences in an Athens maximum-security prison, have escaped. They were airlifted, to be precise. By privately-hired helicopter, off the prison building roof. Again. Having escaped the same way just under three years ago.

What’s the connection between the escape and the various party preoccupations discussed at the start of this post, I hear you ask?
None. None whatsoever. That’s the whole point.
Those governing don’t even bother to come up with a credible story on why things are bad or what they are about to do to make them better. The opposition is jumping up and down going ‘pick me pick me’ with no real plan beyond changing the wallpaper once they are in office and the smaller parties – that could represent the core or at least the start of civil society – are looking in, looking back and looking lost.

As lost as the security services that manage to be terrified of disruptive and violent elements, outwitted by prisoners who do not even need to vary their routines in order to escape and bring the force of the Force to bear on dissenting students, disgruntled farmers and errant teenagers. Same old, really.

And the government does not feel the need to declare elections; the opposition talk about history; and this particular story is getting way out of hand. Same old, yes.

So, I am deploring the state of affairs in Greece again.
For as long as it’s deplorable, I shall be deploring it.
For as long as it takes.

At least we have Dev Patel

Because, let’s face it, reading the British press gives me little joy otherwise.

Jade Goody, of course, all over the papers. And it is terribly sad that she is dying so young. And I appreciate what she is doing and why. But she is one of those celebrities I do not understand – famous for being famous – of which we seem to have many.

The sports pages are out, as my football team needs a miracle to avoid relegation.

The financial pages are interchangeable with the obituaries, without the warm and fuzzy memories of better times, and the analysis pieces seem hell-bent on feeding the monster that is the ‘crisis of confidence’ that they agree underpins it all. And although Gordon assured us he has saved the world, neither the world nor this particular corner of it seem saved or indeed safe.

And today the usually level-headed Guardian predicted a summer of violent street fights for the capital, with the middle classes taking to the streets to protest the credit crunch and fight with the police in the process.

What this fear is based on is unclear.
Clashes over Gaza between police and protesters in January are cited, but the comparison is hardly credible as neither the issues nor the demographics in question are inter-changeable. Plus the January clashes were an isolated incident.
But the article is adamant the police expect a ‘summer of rage’ in 2009. They even seek to scare us with the prediction of ‘a return to the 1980s’. Whether that also entails a covert threat that the police will go back to Thatcherite styles is yet to be determined.

‘Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.’
This is assuming that the middle classes do not demonstrate. And that issue-specific demonstrations are easy to ‘hijack’ by determined agitators. Not to mention the assumption that disgruntled and disappointed masses can and do get violent. All tall orders. All, I’m sure, backed by statistics and blind to individuality.

The fact remains, however, that Mr Hartshorn has intelligence suggesting that the mood of demonstrations has changed recently with a noticeable increase in the specific ‘intent’ to create public unrest among protesters in this country. Plus things are not rosy in the rest of Europe. Inevitably, the farmers’ road blockades in Greece are cited as a sign that this is a Europe-wide phenomenon (failing to mention that such blockades happen every few months in Greece because there the system did not need the global financial meltdown to stop working).
Still, demonstrations also took place in France and Iceland and the piece is evidently worried.

Some of the agitators are well-known, apparently, but in times of stability their message falls on deaf ears, says Hartshorn, whereas now many hitherto respectable citizens may be lead astray out of desperation.

Well, if we know who they are, why don’t we send the agitators to their rooms?
You think I’m going mad, but I’m only quoting from the latest Tory youth offender handling recommendation (‘ground them’).
An ASBO and no TV for two weeks. Sophisticated policy-making in action.

No TV for two weeks might not be a bad idea though. It may actually spare said offending youths from losing their faith in the system entirely. That way they would not hear about the thousands of people who contracted HIV and Hep C through transfusions with contaminated blood during the 70s and 80s.
Just the story the ailing NHS needed to lose even more public confidence, as doctors find themselves over-worked, over-managed and under-trusted by harassed patients.

And I can’t even take solace in the sports pages.
So thank God for Danny Boyle and his decision to receive his Oscar skipping like Tigger. Just the feel good factor we needed.
If only Parliament would close its sessions with a hug, a kiss and a group dance. Skipping is optional.