Cricket: a game of human error and endeavour

Sporting beauty has innumerable facets, but for many of us its greatest attraction lies in the potential for romance. At some point in our ordinary existence, we have played the perfect cover-drive, holed the 25-foot uphill putt, or performed a step-over that left opposition defenders with twisted blood. For that infinitesimal moment, we were Garfield Sobers, Jack Nicklaus or Christiano Ronaldo, with the world our oyster and dreams safely cosseted away from cold reality.

From the time we could grip a bat, we could argue like the best of our heroes. Anyone who remembers like me, kwik-cricket with stumps chalked on a playground wall could tell you that rants and raves were never far away. Those who couldn’t argue took the coward’s way out, skulking home with bat, ball or stumps while the rest jeered and hurled derogatory insults. Leg-before decisions were a parallel universe, and each time the ball slammed into the shin, someone over-eager for a bat would raise the finger. If you were at the receiving end, you whined but it didn’t stop you coming back for more the next day! 

That was the reason most of us went out to play in the first place. If you were the school dunce (just ask a few from my old school-team- Manuel), you could never dream of perfect marks, but on the field, even the most hopeless case could edge the boundary that won a match for his team. Nothing was black-and-white, and we found beauty in the many hues of grey.  And then came along technology. Suddenly, people needed to stare at slow-motion replays to see if a batsman was short of his crease. Batsmen, who used to nonchalantly stroll about the crease after getting the faintest nick through to the keeper, were found out by ingenious little devices like the snick-o-meter. They even took the uncertainty out of the lbw – sport’s equivalent of Russian roulette – by inventing an elaborate tracking system called Hawk-Eye.

So where and how will this trait end? If technology had been fashionable back in 1987, Sunil Gavaskar might have finished his final Test a winner. Instead, he was given out caught off the arm-guard when on 96, as India fell 16 agonising runs short of a famous victory, but do we really care? Indians savour that innings because it ended the way it did- that is part of the romance and the human error of our great game. Cricket’s splendour lies in the fact that while the best team on the day always prevails – that doesn’t happen in football or hockey, where a fluke goal can win a game – there is still plenty of opportunity to bemoan your fate: the no-ball that wasn’t called, the inner edge that kissed the stumps without toppling the bails, or the leg-before that the umpire haughtily turned away. Regardless of whether you’re Sachin Tendulkar or IM Pathetic, we’ve all been at the receiving end of what we’ve perceived, rightly or wrongly, as daylight robbery.

 But it’s not as though match officials haven’t made us smile down the years. We loved Dickie Bird’s just as we loved Pierluigi Collina’s shining pate and Martian eyes. The day you bring in machines, and eliminate human error – bat-pad catches wrongly given, legal goal disallowed – what would we talk about? “We wuz robbed” is every fan’s favourite theme. Take away the mistakes, and you might conceivably get perfect decisions … and no one to talk about them. We’ll take our beauty with a few scars.

British courts must not become a mouthpiece for Islamic extremists

It was with great regret that I read the news that a British court had granted an arrest warrant for the ex-Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, at the request of Palestinian plaintiffs on a charge of war-crimes relating to the Israel-Gaza conflict last winter. Thankfully, that warrant was rapidly withdrawn by the British government but the incident highlighted a wider systematic problem with the issuing of warrants by British courts under the principle of universal jurisdiction, as well as a more concerning development regarding the pandering of British courts to extremist Islamic elements within the British-Muslim population.

Aside from the question of whether or not Israel was guilty of war-crimes in its war with Gaza (I happen to think they weren’t), this incident has the potential to damage UK-Israel relations at a time when it needs to be at its most sturdy in order to address regional problems such as the Iranian nuclear programme and an ongoing war in Afghanistan. As Ms. Livni stated, “This is not a suit against Tzipi Livni, this is not a lawsuit against Israel. This is a lawsuit against any democracy that fights terror” and I must agree with her. The very idea that British courts can be abused in a manner that results in an arrest warrant being granted for a leading political figure from a regional ally is disturbing to say the least.

Courts in this country should not be the legal wing for Palestinian militant movements nor should they be a pawn in any wider political or regional transnational conflict. All we can hope for in this country is that this incident doesn’t damage the credibility of our legal system, or the credibility in the eyes of our Israeli allies, especially at a time when they can be of great value to our regional interests.

Hypocrits descend on Copenhagen

The day has finally arrived when the great and good of the world descend in their thousands on Copenhagen to reach a lasting solution for preventing the worlds greatest inevitability: climate-change- something the world has been doing for millenia; something that existed long before greedy and boring geographers found a penny to be made out of the biggest con since the BBC’s April fool’s spaghetti prank in the 1950’s. Even that fact only became clear earlier this week when our ‘noble’ academics on the subject admitted (in a leaked email) that they had been hiding pieces of raw data from climate change realists (otherwise called ’sceptics’ in the liberal-left press).

However, I wish not to focus on the myths or few realities on the issue of climate change. If this fashionable cause does exist, then these moral-crusaders aren’t exactly doing an awful lot to stop it. According to the Daily Mirror- often a bastion of leftist zealotry- over 15,000 delegates and 98 Presidents and Prime Ministers from 192 countries, are descending on Copenhagen in 140 aircraft (not using bio-fuel I might add) and will be using 1200 limos and other forms of road-transport to move themselves around the city. This obviously doesn’t include the waste of electricity from all the inevitable ‘Twittering’ that will go on in the Conference-hall from the thousands of electronically powered laptops and ‘Blackberrys’ belonging to the 15,000+ delegates.

I really believe that the facts speak for themselves. I would make an educated guess that on this one journey, one delegate uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases than I do in a year. It really is hypocrisy of the highest order. It’s similar to those who campaign for ethical banking and then hold an account with Barclays, or those who crusade against unethical clothing yet precede to blow much of their earnings (or more often student loans) in Topshop. At least when George Bush Jnr. attended these summits he didn’t pretend to believe in the myth that his air-miles could change the temperature of our planet so catastrophically that we would all have to build an ark to escape our low-lying villages and towns.

So, as this rant draws to a close, what of the results of Copenhagen? More of the same I am afraid, which means ‘continued committment to reach our targets….’ and all of the usual spiel that comes from the mouths of individuals who have far too much invested in the status quo to ever want to meaningfully change it.

It’s much easier to apologise for what we are not responsible for…

Gordon Brown will be issuing an official apology in the new-year for the treatment of young British children, sent off for a ‘better life’ in Australia and other Commonwealth nations. Tales are rife of sexual, mental and physical abuse being handed out to the child migrants who were frequently termed as ‘orphans’ and sent away to the ex-colonies for a ‘better life’ and it is for this that Gordon Brown will be apologising.

I am somewhat troubled by this, however. The concept of apologising for something you are not responsible for has always seemed rather pointless to me which is why I was glad that no apology was made for the involvement of this country in the slave-trade. Apart from appeasing certain niche individuals, what would these shallow apologies achieve? We do not need to say sorry for something so blatantly misguided and wrong by our modern standards. That leads me onto my next point. The plight of the said child migrants is a shameful part of our political history, but let’s not interpret our past, wearing the rose-tinted glasses of the present. Where would we draw the line?

If our prime minister had any political gut, there are many more and worthy apologies he could be making. He could apologise for selling off our gold reserves; for building our nations growth on a mountain of debt; for destroying our pension funds; for failing to equip our troops properly to fight a war, instead of shallow statements of apology on a policy he had nothing to do with. I’m sorry.It about time our prime minister got his priorities right.

Dan Hannan MEP Resigns

It has just been broken that Dan Hannan has resigned from the conservative front-bench in Europe in order to continue to campaign for a referendum on the recent ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Hannan was previously the frontbench spokesman for the conservatives on legal affairs.

More to follow as the story breaks.

EU: Decision Time

Inevitably, David Cameron has backtracked on his promises to grant the British people a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Regardless of the fall-out from granting a post-ratification referendum, there can be no doubting the Cameron has placed matters of party unity over and above the democratic responsibilities that he and the other two parties promised us in 2005. Anyone that attempts to distinguish between the ‘constitution’ and ‘Lisbon’ will find it tough. First of all, you’d have to read both documents in full- a challenge I myself refuse to undertake on a matter of principle and on a level of time management. Secondly, I actually don’t think that’s the point. The crux of Lisbon remains the same as the EU ‘constitution’: to transfer more power to Brussels at both our financial expense and at the democratic expense of the British people, many of whom have not even had their say on whether this county should even be a part of this European superstate in the first place.

This is the path that future debate and conservative party policy should take. People have had enough of pussy-footing around the European issue. Let’s face it, any referendum on the Lisbon treaty would have inevitably turned into a debate on Britain’s very future within Europe. That is what people care about, and that is what David Cameron should offer us as part of his ‘new policy’ on Europe. In reality, there is no new policy. It is the same old ‘in Europe, but not run by Europe’ spiel that has dominated conservative policy for over thirty-years. I personally struggle with this slogan- how is it possible to not be run by a deeply rooted beaurocratic organisation that controls our fishing, agriculture, borders and makes 76% of all our laws? Just ask the Irish, the Dutch and even the French who all rejected the constitutional treaty, only to have it forced back on them in some re-muddled state!

For David Cameron, it is decision-time. Many within conservative circles are deeply unhappy at this decision to backtrack on such a long-standing promise. The argument that states that any referendum on Britain’s EU membership per-se would split the conservative party in two is flawed for the simple reason that there are some things that take precedence over and above the unity of a political party. The very future of this country as an independent state is at stake with the passing of Lisbon. As we have seen the past, it does not end there (Rome, SEA 1986, Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam and now Lisbon)- the EU continues to drain away our sovereignty, bringing ever closer the very real prospect of a single European superstate. It’s decision time for Dave and if he makes the right decision, so must we and end our involvement in this deeply flawed and threatening European project.

Privatise the Beeb!

For a few years, I have been unsure of my own stance on the future of the bastion of left-wing political correctness, the BBC. Surprising, one might say. However unlike many of my right-wing counterparts, I have been slightly more optimistic about the opportunities to change the BBC and turn into reality, their claims to be that ‘impartial’ public-broadcasting cooperation. However there have been a few recent incidents that have once again, made me change my mind. Ultimately, any public-service broadcaster that is funded by government cannot be impartial. Any organisation reliant on public-funding will never be fully impartial; it’s a contradiction in terms.

The first incident that niggled me this week was ‘HobNobGate’- the BBC’s Andrew Neil making a light-hearted quip and comparing Diane Abbot to a chocolate hob-nob. Within minutes, BBC bosses pulled the show off iplayer to avoid the inevitable upset and irreversible offence caused by such an un-PC comment. See the clip here:

***

It’s not just this incident that has niggled me. In his latest series, Andrew Marr partook in unashamed self-flagellation when he devoted a completely disproportionate twelve-minute section of his ‘History of Britain’ series on British ‘concentration camps’ in the South African territories during the Boer engagement of the early twentieth-century as well as the views of a minority scientist whose thinking ‘traces a line to Hitler and the extermination of the Jews’.

Then of course, there’s the timeless favourite of the BBC: anti-Israel propaganda. The BBC obsess themselves with every leftist report that can possibly be presented as a war-crime, in particular, this from Amnesty International that falsely accuses Israel of denying Palestinians water. Furthermore, if they did report such perfidious findings in a non-partisan fashion, they wouldn’t sensationalise them in a way likely to cause maximum outrage amongst their trusting viewers and licence payers.

The BBC ceased to be impartial years ago. It a self-interested, politically driven institution that doesn’t deserve a penny of tax-payers money. There’s no use denying it either- just look at what those that are part of the project think themselves:

‘We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.’-BBC drama commissioning controller, Ben Stephenson, July 16 2009

____________

***Apologies, the BBC have decided to remove the video from Youtube. Maybe it adds weight to the crux of my argument?

The Week’s Top 5

My top-5 stories for the week- worth a quick glance in case anything may have passed you by.

1- Barack Hussain Obama hosts a haloween party. Such a man of the people, eh?

2- HRH Prince Philip back on form with this top-gaffe.

3- Another royal ‘blunder’. This time, it’s Edward putting his foot in it.

4- For all those with geeky relatives- 15 of the best ‘Christmas gifts for geeks’. Rather entertaining.

5- Peter Hitchens: saying what we all think but don’t dare to say…

Only realism can win us Afghanistan conflict

Opposition to our military involvement in Afghanistan has been growing over recent weeks as troop deaths rise and our government struggles to define the mission goals and exit conditions for the conflict. Not only is the development worrying for the morale of our troops but it is also potentially extremely detrimental to our national security. That is the emphasis that explanations for the conflict must stress. Our role in Afghanistan must only be reasoned in the language of realist thought. It should not be justified along the lines of bringing “Jeffersonian democracy to a thirteenth-century state” as Liam Fox put it on Sunday AM (18/10/09). This involvement has nothing to do with the electoral corruption within the system. Anyone so idealist that their warped sense of reality brings them to believe that this backward nation was going to have western-style ‘free and fair’ elections deserves to have no meaningful input on this debate. Furthermore, anyone that believes that this futile cause is worth the life of just one British serviceman is severely misjudged, as is anyone that, like Harriet Harman, believes the provision of education to Afghan women is the underlying achievement/mission-goal of this involvement.

The arm-chair critics of the war are lacking in either memory or backbone, or perhaps (and most likely) both. The unimaginable terror that resulted from the events on 9/11 in New York was both planned and coordinated by Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan; supported and protected by the Taleban regime. The reason for our involvement in a region that is frankly the arse-hole of the world was and is simple: to remove the freedom that Al-Qaeda had in Afghanistan to perpetuate indiscriminate terror-attacks against British (and western) interests. To this day, this should be the underlying principle of our involvement in the region. Only when Afghanistan is able to take care of its own security (and with it, ours as well) should British involvement in the region be wound down. That is, as political commentators prefer to call it, our ‘exit strategy’. There can be no time-frame for this.

However, this all said, does this mean I am advocating a continuation with the current military strategy being pursued in Helmand Province? The answer is no, far from it. Clearly the current military strategy in Afghanistan is not working in its current form. In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan with over 250,000 men- they were unable to take and hold ground. What makes our current commanders think that we are able to do it with 9,000 men in the most volatile area in the country? For those who understand the pre-2006 phase of the conflict and more particularly, the very early stages of the conflict, many hundreds of thousand of Taleban and Al-Qaeda personnel were killed in a carefully coordinated covert war involving US, British and Australian special-forces and operatives on the ground with northern-alliance fighters. Combined, these men directed US air-power onto specified targets and within weeks, the Taleban regime crumbled*.

Do these early stages of the conflict not provide us with some useful current solutions? In a word, yes they do. With our current technology that includes unmanned and armed drone reconnaissance planes, satellites and stealth-bombers, a well-conducted and persistent air-war against Al-Qaeda targets directed by small special-forces groups and internal Afghan forces would achieve our imperative mission goal and severely disrupt the ability of Al-Qaeda to operate freely within the country. Combining this strategy with the retention of a force in Afghanistan to train up a new Afghan army gives military commanders a real and plausable alternative to the current stalemate.

The fact is that the current strategy and mission goals simply don’t correlate. Our troops shouldn’t be dying providing third-rate education to Afghan women; they shouldn’t they be dying to provide some utopian idea of an ‘Afghan democracy’; nor should they be dying to prevent the trade of opium that Afghans have partaken in since the days of the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan in 642 AD (and no doubt long before this). Our troops are there for one reason and one reason only: to further and ensure our national security.

In short, our mission goals and strategy in Afghanistan should be this:

“To prevent a safe-haven for Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan through a carefully conducted and sustained bombing campaign against Taleban interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, directed by current Afghan forces and special-forces operatives within the region [inc. Pakistan border area]. This is to be combined with the retention of a small-number of regular forces to train and equip a new Afghan army, capable of providing for their own security, and with it, ours as well.”

* Hunting Bin Laden by Robin Moore is well worth a read!

Cameron good on the EU

The blogosphere is full of various individual viewpoints on ‘that speech’ this afternoon so I shan’t bore you with more similar in depth assertions. In all honesty, I don’t have that much of a view worth spending too much time on. For what it’s worth though, I thought his speech was ok. Not great; not groundbreaking. I thought that its biggest flaw was that it  failed to relay howthe many policy principles outlined were to be achieved. I found myself asking, “how, how how?” to an awful many things and this will become more of a problem closer to an election. However on a more positive note, it certainly rallied the party faithful. They will go back to their constituencies and deliver a clear and concise message to voters. That is what delegates like and I do believe, people in the country. The atmosphere was also very different to the morgue-like atmosphere of Labour in Brighton a week ago and in spite of the emphasis on the hard times that lie ahead, this was a source for a little optimism.

As an individual who typically tends to sit rather further ‘right’ than Mr. Cameron, I would like to emphasise my own delight with his message on Europe. During his speech, I was rather excited by his promise that we should only co-operate with the EU on issues such as climate-change, terrorism and free-trade. In other words, ‘the political involvement ends here’, indeed my take on this area of Cameron’s address was that he was making a clear promise that any future government under his leadership would repatriate power from Brussels back to Westminster.

Personally, I found this encouraging. Maybe I was suckered in too much by his rhetoric and tone. On this, only time will tell. Nevertheless, it gave me something to smile about in an otherwise uncontroversial speech to round off this years conference season. Now that it’s all over, all that remains is for me to indulge on a bottle of bubbly.

Goodnight.