Tim Collard's blog on (and off) the Daily Telegraph

This blog is based on the one I write on the Daily Telegraph website (blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/timcollard). But it also contains posts which the Telegraph saw fit to spike, or simply never got round to putting up.

I'm happy for anyone to comment, uncensored, on anything I have to say. But mindless abuse, such as turns up on the Telegraph site with depressing regularity (largely motivated my my unrepentant allegiance to the Labour Party), is disapproved of. I am writing under the name which appears on my passport and birth certificate; anyone else is welcome to write in anonymously, but remember that it is both shitty and cowardly to hurl abuse from under such cover. I see the blogosphere as the equivalent of a pub debate: a bit of knockabout and coarse language is fine, but don't say anything that would get you thumped in the boozer. I can give as good as I get, and I know how to trace IP addresses.

Sunday 30 August 2009

We're too wet to deal with illegal immigrants - so we take it out on the legitimate ones

I’ve discovered who’s to blame for the immigration problem. It’s me. I am solely responsible for bringing into this country an unwarranted foreign body, and those stalwart chaps at the Home Office are quite rightly doing all they can to thwart me. Mea culpa – with millions of no doubt excellent true-blue British women to choose from, I have irresponsibly chosen to marry a Chinese and try to settle her here.

The aim of UK immigration policy is to try to offset the millions of illegal immigrants we are too wet to do anything about by making it as difficult as possible to introduce legitimate ones. When I was in our Embassy in China, I once appealed to a big cheese from London to make it a bit easier for important business people with money to spend to get into the UK. I was told that there was a big illegal immigration problem from China, which I knew, and that we had to man the defences with ever greater vigilance. The fact that the illegals who are brought in on the back of lorries have never seen the inside of a British visa office was considered irrelevant. We had to do our best to keep down the numbers where we had the power to, i.e. among the relatively legitimate visitors, to make up for all the gangsters’ passengers we couldn’t control. Of course, for those who believe in purely numerical constraints on immigrants, this would be fine.

Meanwhile, there is my lady wife, who has been here two years already and now needs to apply for permanent leave to remain. There are three ways to apply: in person, by post, and from another country. In person would obviously be best, but we were told all through August that there were no more appointments left in August. So we waited until August 28th, when we were told that there were no appointments in September either. She has to have her application in by 17th September, and wasn’t allowed to apply until 28 days in advance. So the apply-in-person option didn’t in fact exist. The postal route was a possibility, assuming one can trust the post not to lose things, but the “target” response time for this route is six months, with a target of 95% response within this time. And – the real killer – it’s not just that she has to send her passport into the Home Office limbo for that period, but I have to as well. Now, this isn’t on: like a lot of people, I need to travel. That leaves flying to Beijing. I wouldn’t mind that, but it’s not exactly the cheap option. And can I discuss this with anyone? You’ve guessed it – not a chance. No phone numbers anywhere – I may just have to go to the Borders Agency in Liverpool and try, with little optimism, to rustle someone up.

Immigration formalities are clearly made as impenetrable as possible in the hope that people will give up. You’re made to play the beggar at every turn; if you don’t like that situation, the hint is, you can always eff off. I can’t help thinking that my wife might have done better to claim political asylum on arrival, rather than entering as the wife of a man with 20 years Crown service.

Saturday 29 August 2009

China is losing patience with Burma, its basket-case neighbour

The Guardian reports that fighting between the army of the Burmese junta and Shan minority forces in the border state of Kokang have caused thousands of Burmese to do a runner into China. Moreover, the Shan separatist media (www.shanland.org) claim that some of the fighting was so close to the border that a People’s Liberation Army soldier copped a fatal Burmese Army bullet. Now, neither of these events, if factual, will be sufficient to trigger real Chinese counter-action; but it must be one more step in the gradual process by which China loses patience with its basket-case neighbour.

Obviously, China approves of the current form of government in Burma, and of its pariah (i.e. Chinese client) status; but it is at least supposed to be a proper tyranny, and keep the peace on China’s borders, keeping stroppy ethnic minorities in order. China has quite enough of its own minorities in Yunnan Province, who are quiet enough for now, but who knows how they might react to a continuing refugee flow, or for that matter to a greatly stepped-up PLA presence on what has hitherto been a fairly porous border?

Incidentally, it so happens that the capital of the Burmese state of Kokang, where all these refugees are supposed to be running away from, is called Laogai. Now that, in Chinese, is the name of the prison camp system, a rough synonym for Gulag. It’d be rather a bitter irony if the poor old Burmese refugees ended up there…

Wednesday 26 August 2009

A week in Budapest: well done those Magyars!

My recent hiatus in transmission was caused by a holiday with my sons in Budapest, one of my favourite cities. For those who don’t know it, it has that elegiac, fin-de-last-siècle-but-one, late-Habsburg atmosphere that Vienna has more or less grown out of. My aim was to fill a bit of a gap in my cultural grasp of south-eastern Europe; this was shared to some extent by son A, a history buff like myself, while son B was delighted to find that opportunities for eating chips and pizza, watching DVDs and Premiership footie and sleeping all day are also not lacking in Budapest.

The best thing about Budapest are the Turkish baths, which really are Turkish; it was only the occupying Ottomans in the 16th and 17th centuries who developed the ubiquitous hot springs, and the baths’ survival in largely original form provoked me to say The more modern baths are all mixed-sex and swimming-costumes; as a stern traditionalist I regarded a single-sex party as essential, which is why I took the sons and left the lady wife at home. In the older baths men sit around in white aprons, sagely and reflectively steaming, some of them even fatter than me. Highly civilised. Best of all is that the baths have remained but Islamic law hasn’t, as after two hours’ steaming one could murder a beer. (I never thought I’d hear this from my own lips, but there may be something to be said for an Islamic conquest and occupation, provided that it doesn’t go on too long.)

A more recent occupation has also been dealt with rather well by the Hungarians. In 1989 they found themselves with a large amount of socialist-realist statuary which had suddenly become surplus to requirements. Instead of breaking it up to build public conveniences, or leaving it to decay and disappear under avian crap, they lugged it all out to a little park some way out of town and re-erected it all, the pretensions of its sculptors and sponsors looking even more ridiculous in this setting than they would anyway, a hyperexample of reach exceeding grasp. Well done, the Magyars.

Tuesday 25 August 2009

Lockerbie: Megrahi may have been the victim of a political fix, but don't expect the CIA to set the record straight

Poor old Gordon is getting pilloried again, this time for finding nothing to say on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. I admit his excuse is thin; the Scottish justice system may be devolved, but it can’t be denied that this case does have a teensy-weensy bit of a foreign policy angle, and that isn’t devolved.

But perhaps that mighty brain has been processing Wittgenstein, who famously ended his Tractatus with the insight: “If something can’t be spoken of, best to shut up about it”. For there is, indeed, nothing to say. Everyone knows, however often it’s denied, that one factor in the public view of this case is that there was something rather iffy about the trial, and that Megrahi may have been the expendable victim of a political fix. This can never be openly admitted. The world and his granny have been firing off more or less convincing theories about what really happened: but no-one knows, or those that do can be counted on one’s fingers. Nobody is ever going to set the record straight, because the CIA is (somehow) involved, and they don’t do that sort of thing. This may be because there are still actual repercussions to be feared; more likely, because the truth will embarrass someone one doesn’t want to embarrass; but possibly because there is a certain amount of macho posturing about secrecy going on. Nobody takes themselves more seriously than the American diplomatic/security establishment.

So we can speculate all we like: we’re never going to know. Gordon might as well maintain his Zen posture. Personally, having close-range experience of what terminal prostate cancer is like, I’m with Kenny MacAskill: no need to pile on the agony. And may Megrahi be forgiven his sins, whatever they were.

Tuesday 11 August 2009

The Independent demonstrates the perils faced by a PC paper

I’ve been waiting for any follow-up to a story in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, relating the sadly familiar tale of a female domestic servant being kept in slavery and subjected to abuse by a diplomatic family in London. The woman claims that she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a diplomat and his “royal” wife, and has been granted £20,000 in unpaid wages by an employment tribunal, but has no way of obtaining it as the couple has returned home and are hiding behind diplomatic immunity.

Well, that’s diplomats for you, some will say, implying that UK diplomats probably do the same sort of thing. Well, as an ex-diplomat, I can say confidently that our chaps would not be able to get away with anything of the sort. I’m not saying that our lot don’t occasionally park in the wrong place or drive after a tincture or two too many, knowing that the cops won’t touch a car with CD plates, but if they killed someone in the latter capacity they’d get the book thrown at them.

But other nations may not be so squeamish. Some of the commentators in the Indie are just to sweet for words. One recommends contacting the local press of the country involved, saying “the local press of those countries would be more than willing to publish and expose the culprits publicly”. Bless!

We’re talking about a country where diplomats have “royal” wives. Which one? Well, the abused woman doesn’t want to be named. Understandable enough. The Indie doesn’t name the employers either, “because the victim fears reprisals”. Fair enough. She claims they have “power in her country” and have issued death threats to her and her families. Well, which country was it? Nobody is saying. But I guess it isn’t Denmark.

So, then, we’ve got a country which can abuse people with complete impunity on British soil, and which can frighten into silence not only a poor woman and her family in a poor country, but also a leading UK newspaper. Well, if no-one’s saying, we’re at liberty to guess. Where’s your money?

But, interestingly, they couldn’t frighten the Indie enough to spike the story altogether. Well done, Indie, especially the “royal” giveaway. But one can only imagine the editorial conferences there:

“Look, we have to run this story. We’re a feminist newspaper!”

“But we’re a progressive newspaper too, and it may involve people it would be very unprogressive to offend.”

“Never mind that! Women’s lives are at stake! What would Joan Smith say?”

“Well, what would Robert Fisk say? And (mysteriously) it isn’t only Robert Fisk…”

And thus a compromise is hammered out, in which the story is run but no country is mentioned. Like the time they did a feature on honour killings without the slightest reference to which faith communities are involved, as if honour killings are just as likely to occur in gated communities outside Weybridge.

It must be jolly hard work being PC. Thank Heaven we on the penumbra of the Telegraph don’t have to bother…

Monday 10 August 2009

Chinese princelings – the cover-up gets more difficult

China-watchers are amused by statistics quoted by Chinese researchers alleging that over 90 per cent of Chinese billionaires are the children of leading Communist Party cadres – and by the Government’s hyper-sensitive refutation of the allegations. This is interesting on several counts. Firstly, these statistics come not from some foreign source, but from official organisations within China, who must have known how sensitive the subject is. Central media control is clearly slipping.

And, while the researchers must have known that the government wouldn’t like it, they will also have known that the revelations would strike a chord among the grassroots. Chinese nationals are usually happy to defend their government against Western criticism; but no one regards these allegations as implausible. Ironically, it is one of the better Chinese qualities which renders the story so credible: almost all Chinese regard promoting the life chances of their children as the highest good, and so it is entirely likely that senior leaders will do the same. (Strangely Mao was an exception; he let his son get killed in Korea like everybody else’s.)

An amusing angle on this comes from one of the Chinese-language papers which circulate among Chinese communities in the UK, which are completely outside PRC control. One article refers to last month’s story about a corruption case in Namibia involving a company managed by Hu Haifeng, son of President Hu Jintao. This has, of course, gone completely unmentioned in the official Chinese media. However, as the paper notes, the Chinese internet community has noticed that web searches on “Namibia” or “Hu Haifeng” have been coming up blank, and are putting two and two together for themselves…

Saturday 8 August 2009

Darius Guppy, full-dress apologist for Iran's thuggish regime

News trickles out of Iran concerning the fate of a girl named Taraneh, who was disappeared by government security forces in the wake of last month’s post-election protests. Like the murdered woman Neda Agha-Soltan, Taraneh was not actually participating in the demonstrations, but had just stopped to watch on her way to work. However, she was slung into a van with all the others arrested. When the party reached the secret detention centre, Taraneh’s interrogation took much longer than that of all the others. She was also prevented from ringing her family to tell them what had happened, as the others were allowed to do.

Family and friends found out from a local hospital that a girl answering Taraneh’s description had been brought in recently showing symptoms of brutal, multiple rape, but had been taken away soon afterwards. A few days later, following a tip-off, they found her burnt body by a roadside. (Hat tip: iransolidarity.org.uk)

We know that employees of the Islamic Republic of Iran rape women to death – they even did it to a Canadian citizen, Zahra Kazemi, a few years back. All this regime’s representatives, and all its supporters, should be held to account for that dreadful fact.

Which brings us on to a name from the past.

Readers no longer in their first youth will remember Darius Guppy. Eton and Oxford, friend of Boris Johnson, sent to prison for jewellery fraud? You’ve got him.

Guppy has now turned up again as a full-dress apologist for the Iranian regime. In the Independent, a paper which is, shall we say, not choosy, he has written an article telling the (equally undiscriminating) readership how superior the Islamic Republic is to wet, decadent Britain, where, shockingly, women may express opposition to the Government without being raped to death.

Regarding the elections, Guppy claims it is ridiculous to “suggest that two undeniably devout men, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, should have engaged in such an un-Islamic conspiracy as cheating their own people”. Yeah, right.

And then a plunge into the waters of pure nutterdom: “The planet has been brought to its knees by bourgeois greed. Scientists increasingly consider us to be in the midst of a ‘mass extinction event’, similar to that which gripped the world when a giant meteorite slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and extinguished the dinosaurs.” Get your story straight, Darry. Either we’re being destroyed by bourgeois greed (I wouldn’t entirely disagree). Or we’ll be destroyed by an asteroid strike which cannot possibly have anything to do with human economic activity. Make up your mind.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, points the way forward. “God willing, she can then become what Huntingdon [sic] refers to as a ‘core state’ around which other nations that cherish freedom can coalesce.” I thought that was happening already: Chavez, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, all those cherishers of freedom are already on side. For heaven’s sake, a “nation” is not the same thing as a government.

When Guppy and people who think like him praise “nations who cherish freedom”, they’re actually lending moral support to “governments whose agents cherish the freedom to rape women to death”. Well, if Guppy’s now Iranian I suggest he stays where he is.

Friday 7 August 2009

Bank profits and bonuses bounce back? Sorry I can't raise a cheer

So bank profits are back in the billions, and bonuses abound. The lap-dancing industry and the Colombian export trade can breathe again.

Naturally, the vested-interest brigade is trying to convince us that this is a good thing. No it isn’t. Charging exorbitant fees to proper businesses and gambling with other people’s money is not a respectable way to earn a living. And how do they make quite so much money? Given that banks are largely dealing with other people’s money, how is it that quite so much of it seems to stick to their fingers?

We’re asked why, if banks are trading so successfully as to make large profits, the individuals involved shouldn’t get a fair share of the benefit? But when the banker puts up a massive black and loses billions, he doesn’t get his house and Ferrari repossessed. Maybe not quite “heads I win, tails you lose”, but certainly “heads I win, tails we’ll call it a draw”. It is this imbalance of risk that very recently got us all into serious trouble.

Additionally, if anyone even thinks about raising the levels of tax which most of them don’t even pay, we’re threatened with a “brain drain”. Do they mean the brain drain caused by our best and brightest graduates being attracted into the financial services industry when what we need is doctors, teachers, engineers and actual entrepreneurs? No, they just mean bankers being tempted to send house prices sky-high in New York or Dubai rather than London, and to wreck someone else’s economy. Well, make my day.

And please, no more of this tired stuff about “the politics of envy”. That line has underpinned gross greed for thirty years, but it’s now past its sell-by. Who could be envious of cokeheads working 18-hour days? The politics of equity, more like, which is not the same thing as equality. Even the Telegraph’s Jeff Randall (no socialist he) has pointed out that bankers are not living in the same world as the rest of us, and this cannot be a good thing. In more refined circles, I call my views “the politics of the Magnificat”. Yes, putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away have the explicit endorsement of the Blessed Virgin Herself. So there.

Wednesday 5 August 2009

God bless Wales and Nye Bevan

I’ve just driven back from seeing my sister in South Wales. After about seventy-three cancer operations and more drugs than Amy Winehouse, she is looking fantastic (she isn’t yet 40). She lives in an old pit village in the valley of Nye Bevan and Neil Kinnock. The valleys seem remarkably idyllic; “but what do people do?” my wife asked. Well, a lot of them are retired; many are teachers – they have managed to keep most of the village schools open – and there are quite a few people working in Cardiff or Newport. And no doubt there are many working in social services and suchlike. My sister, being severely disabled and deserted by her husband, does call to a certain extent on social services, but far more on centuries-old community solidarity; she is clearly known and loved. Nye, you may have lost the mines; but your spirit lives and walks in the Sirhowy valley.

Despite the insistence of my satnav that I’d be better off sticking to the motorways, I decided to drive all the way up the Welsh border. First up the valley to Tredegar, to pay my respects to Nye, and to sing “The Bells of Rhymney” to myself through many of the places it mentions. Then through the Brecon Beacons – utterly deserving of their National Park status, up to Presteigne, where we had an extended stop because my wife had spotted an antique shop, which, like all antique shops (or so I am told) contained a genuine Ming Dynasty plate.

Then past the field of Mortimer’s Cross, a turning point in the Wars of the Roses, and Oswestry, where King Oswald of Mercia was killed in 642 in a doomed pagan attempt to halt the Christianisation of England. My wife had lost all faith in my navigation by now, largely because I pointed out each time we passed from England into Wales and vice versa (it got into double figures) and because Marcher villages with their stone churches look remarkably similar: “Look, this is the third time we’ve been through here!” “No it isn’t, darling”. But in my book it beat the M5 and M6, with which I am thoroughly bored.

At one point in A. E. Housman country she asked me (she is Chinese, and we are both well-travelled) what my favourite countryside in the world was. A silly time to ask, and of course I was accused of chauvinistic nationalism. You can’t win, can you?

Monday 3 August 2009

Will China make its currency convertible? Or would it rather own the United States?

A report in the Times suggests that China is making serious preparations for internationalising its currency. What does this mean? Well, it may surprise some to hear that the currency of the world’s fastest rising economic power is not formally convertible. You can’t get it at Thomas Cook’s. You’re not allowed to take it out of the country. (Don’t grass me up, but I’ve got 106 renminbi in my wallet. Sod all in sterling, though.) A few years ago a Chinese friend entrusted me with a brown envelope containing £15,000 in Hong Kong dollars to give to her sister who was getting married in Clacton-on-Sea – she couldn’t think of any other way to do it.

International trade in the gazillions, and you can’t exchange currencies except at the Bank of China. It seems bizarre, but just possibly China is poised to throw off the shackles and let the renminbi sink or swim. Hong Kong, in particular, hopes to make use of its semi-detached status to establish itself as China’s offshore renminbi trading centre.

But we should hold our horses. Most Chinese I speak to cannot see this happening for a long time. For China to release control of currency exchange rates would probably be a step too far; partly because they don’t like releasing control of anything, and partly because they are conscious that their safety-first approach serves as insulation. China took only a limited hit in the economic convulsions of 2008: the export trade was badly damaged, but the internal market remained buoyant; the big cities are booming and consuming like anything. And they are aware that this was largely thanks to their protection from the wilder excesses of the West’s casino banks.

Yes, the non-convertibility of their own currency does mean they are forced to maintain massive dollar reserves; but they are in no hurry to replace the dollar with the renminbi as a reserve currency. It would look good: but they can live with massive holdings of US Treasuries, warming their hearts with the thought that democratic (small “d”) irresponsibility is fast turning the USA into a wholly owned subsidiary of the PRC.

Sunday 2 August 2009

BA's financial crisis: the axe of fate couldn't have hit a more deserving target

“Schadenfreude” is a magnificent word for a not very nice sentiment. But sometimes you can’t help feeling that the axe of fate couldn’t have hit a more appropriate target. I refer, of course, to the current severe financial problems at British Airways.

They tell us that their problems are caused by the collapse of “business travel” following recent economic shenanigans; they are more affected by this than other airlines, it seems, because their “business model” has always concentrated predominantly on “front end” travellers, i.e. those in fat-cat and corporate-zombie classes. Too right it has, as anyone who has travelled in their deep-vein-thrombosis class has always known. BA has always been notorious for its utter unconcern for these people, who are generally the only passengers who have paid for their own tickets.

We know who you are and where you live. We remember how you tried to de-British yourselves – no doubt to appease rich American Anglophobes – with the the redesign of the tailfin to replace the red white and blue with some multicoloured primitivism (O for a three-year old with a box of crayons – I’d make a fortune). Don’t come crying to us when it all goes pear-shaped.

But most of all we’ll remember the total contempt for the rank and file. My personal last straw occurred when my 15-year-old son was left stranded at Heathrow after his flight was cancelled, with no information whatsoever available on what would happen next, within an hour of the midnight airport closure. You and I would know that, if we were left flat, we could check into a hotel with a credit card and sort it out in the morning. You can’t do that when you’re 15. In the end we told him to find someone in a uniform and cling to them like a limpet, and eventually they sorted him out. They still lost his luggage, though.

There are better airlines around. Some of them remember that they’re ultimately reliant on the ordinary paying customer.

Saturday 1 August 2009

China is planning to increase tax on alcohol. The workers will not like this at all

The China Daily, that great wielder of the sword of Truth, has issued a dire warning to the unregenerate. From today the government is increasing the taxation on high-powered alcohol.

I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for years. Chinese firewater (alcohol content 50 per cent plus) is astonishingly cheap. Yes, all right, the cheap stuff is very horrible indeed, but there can be few cheaper countries for the unfussy to get banjaxed. Beer, likewise, is jolly reasonable when free of bar mark-ups. How come they’ve never tapped this potential source of revenue?

The answer is obvious, given a little thought. The Soviets never dared to mess too much with the price or supply of vodka. China is not much different; like Russians, the Chinese will put up with a lot, provided they have access to misery’s best-known antidote. And the drinks of the Chinese working class are beer and rough grain spirit. They have to be kept accessible. I remember visiting a village in the far north-east circa 1990: I remarked that the village shop’s stock appeared to be 75 per cent booze. “Yes”, they told me. “Up here, we only have four months a year for agriculture, and we work very hard for that time. From September to May it’s too cold to work: we just lock ourselves in and play cards and drink.”

The alcohol taxation system has hitherto been rather peculiar: a low-level flat tax on all spirituous liquors, plus an additional ad valorem tax, i.e. one levied on the price of the drink rather than on its content. This enables the government to raise revenue from the top end of the market while leaving the bottom end more or less alone: impeccable socialism. As it happens, demand elasticity is more or less infinite at the top end, where the most prestigious stuff costs sixty quid a bottle: rich Chinese are happier when things are expensive, as it facilitates showing off.

However, the proposed tax changes relate to the flat tax, not to the ad valorem element, which is clearly working fine. An analyst quoted by the China Daily suggests that the liquor companies’ profits will be squeezed by 15-20 per cent. He hasn’t quite got capitalism, has he? You don’t let a tax increase squeeze your profits, you pass it on to the customer. So, it looks like a price hike, small in absolute terms but quite significant percentage-wise, on the cheap hooch which keeps the workers happy. I wonder how this will play in the rust belt.