Two days ago, cheap Tuesday at Odeon opened up the possibilities of super cinema as with the afternoon off, I could indulge in more movies than usual. I settled on Battlefield Los Angeles for mid-afternoon as I knew it would be a hard sell to get Altaa to come and then, when I got home, gave her the decision whether to watch The King’s Speech (again, but it was a wonderful film) at 8.30 pm or The Adjustment Bureau at 9.20 pm.
Battlefield Los Angeles (hereafter BLA) is a lot better than I expected. Dealing with the hoary concept of alien invasion, it had a new take on it. Most disaster movies avoid Los Angeles (Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones being a notable exception), given that it has only one globally recognised symbol in the Hollywood Sign and a few name-recognition sites, like Beverley Hill, Hollywood itself, Venice Beach and South Central, though these are hard to visualise. If you’re going for impact, New York is a favourite (versions of which Superman, Batman and Spiderman and others, deem worth fighting to defend against from attack by their foes). On the West Coast, the Old World elegance of San Francisco is deemed ripe for destruction. LA just doesn’t have that cachet and secretly there are probably many who think it deserves annihilation. Perhaps for this reason a good many action movies are located in LA just so it can be smashed up, acting essentially as both anywheresville and nowheresville.
BLA plays it like an action flick but is in reality in the disaster camp as the arrival of the aliens is a true calamity for Earth. Talk of Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro falling and brief shots of “Britain, London facing destruction” and Germany (though surely that couldn’t be Berlin given its distance from the sea?) illustrates how widespread the threat to humanity is. International terrorism is only obliquely referenced but in post-9/11 days, as in Cloverfield, films depicting a merciless, unquantifiable enemy that poses a real threat to our way of life have a certain dynamic not present before 11th September 2001.
I must say, the alien strategy is deeply flawed (though I guess the humans had to have some sort of chance). There seems to have been little, if any, worthwhile reconnaissance. There are twenty separate focal points, yet three of them are in California, leaving seventeen for the rest of the world. They need to be near the sea (for sucking it up for some reason), so what about all those major population centres deep inland, like Moscow or Chengdu or Delhi? Unlike in Independence Day, instead of blitzing the human race from the skies before sending in ground troops, infantry are in the first line of the offensive – though innumerable, they are not invulnerable to high velocity bullets (despite having access to faster than light technology). They certainly have tremendous firepower but are open to explosive human attacks, especially from guided cruise missiles. If that’s the case, I would be surprised in the Russians and the Chinese did not use tactical nuclear weapons to drive back the interlopers because they have no forcefield shields. In terms of the context, it is akin to Hernan Cortes striking at the Aztec Empire, though that nearly ended with the conquistadors being wiped out, before they triumphed. Tactically, it is strictly First World War, as they seek to bludgeon their way forward, irrespective of their own casualties.
The characters involve mostly a platoon of US marines who have to enter enemy territory to rescue a group of civilians. They are fleshed out just enough for us to recognise when they are killed and care when that happens. Given that high-profile actors outside of Aaron Eckhart are kept to a minimum, you really don’t know who will be picked off next.
They pitch up at a wrecked police station after fighting their way in. They find several cowering civilians, two of them maybe aliens themselves with their Latino accents and that they are at a police station. It is left unsaid. Common humanity is the key. Of course, like the first season of 24 and death toll there, it seems a little unreasonable that so many marines lose their lives for a few civilians. The film answers this, by showing that had the marines held their base positions they would have been wiped out. To further justify the excursion, with the civilians safe, they go on to take on the regional command and control ‘asset’ of the aliens. Ultimately, humanity is given hope, but the real beating heart of any alien movie set on Earth is that despite their extra-terrestrial origins they represent aspects of the human experience – one commentator in BLA says the motives of the aliens are classic colonisation techniques. Some aliens are kind, others are cruel, but it is always through the prism of what humans think they or others would do in the same position.

Altaa chose, out of two options I presented her with (I wasn’t enamoured or enamoured enough of the other releases), The Adjustment Bureau. It was billed as Inception meets Bourne – it wasn’t in the same league as those films, but it was still worth the price of admission. It starred Matt Damon, who is working a good 1970s line in paranoid movies, with Emily Blunt blossoming as the female lead in a major Hollywood film as her career arc progresses upwards. Terence Stamp comes in late but cuts a forbidding presence. As to the others, there is fine ensemble acting.
The film concerns all those little things that happen in our lives but elude rational, plausible explanation. The members of the Adjustment Bureau ensure that our lives take the paths they were meant to, along the lines of ‘there’s a reason for everything’. They could be angels but they call themselves case officers. They work for the Chairman, who is not called God but the obvious implication is there. With a neat liberal twist, Damons’ character, David Norris, is told that regarding the Chairman, even if we didn’t recognise it, we’ve all met him – or her. It was probably thrown in to counteract that the fact that all the case officers are men, operating an unseen patriarchy.
One can tell the age of the novel, written by the renowned Phillip K. Dick, as it mentions how Norris’ father was a big fan of JFK and took his son to the senate gallery as a result, but JFK would have long since stopped being a senator (and alive for that matter) by the time Norris would have been born. It would made more sense to namecheck Bobby Kennedy or another liberal hero in Congress, though it is clever in not identifying Norris’s own political affiliations (Damon’s are well known). Stamp lectures about how mankind was guided from hunter-gatherers to the height of the Roman Empire, before the Bureau stepped back and the Dark Ages ensued, but it would have made more sense to talk of the height of the Roman and Han Empires (about 160 A.D. I’d say), not to mention having appeal in the Chinese market. In a way, as these are my two greatest quibbles, it goes to say that the rest of the motion picture is very enjoyable.
The greatest draw of the movie is how it can relate to all of us, all of those crossroads in life that at the time all available options were possible, but looking back the route taken seems set in stone. In a way, this is because we are slaves to our personalities – barring split-second decisions before we have a chance to think, what we go for is determined by who we are and even indecision is an unwitting course of action based on our ingrained mindset. And the Adjustment Bureau have a way of affecting that as well.

With “all necessary means” bar a ground invasion authorised against the Gaddafi regime by the United Nations, let us hope that this will not only revitalise the rebel movement but encourage more so-called followers to abandon this grotesque family. I could not believe the UN, specifically Russia and China, would let such an aggressive stance pass, but to their credit they allowed it. Admittedly, Moscow and Beijing did abstain along with Germany, India and Brazil, but no-one voted against it and so tacitly endorsed it. So, Saif Gaddafi, are Russia, China, Germany and India still going to get those contracts you promised?
In all this, we should not overlook the role of Barack Obama who has played a blinder. A true liberal president. When this crisis involved civilians being massacred and the rebels began to fall back, he made the USA take a cool official stance, let others do the running, notably the UK and France. Not long after, the Arab League endorsed a no-fly zone and still the US underplayed it, allowing consensus to build. Then at the last moment, he placed on the Security Council table a far harder, more assertive policy, blindsiding Russia and China, who had been won round (quietly) to a no-fly zone. If Washington DC had taken up an aggressive stance from the start, this would never have been given legal cover. It just goes to show that hectoring megaphone diplomacy does not get you UN resolutions in your favour (cf. 2002-3). It is the difference between baring one’s teeth to prove that you have them, getting everyone’s backs up and being reasonable and not insecure, while never denying that you do possess teeth.
A genuine humanitarian crisis caused by deliberate man-made actions can galvanise the international community, especially where Russian and Chinese interests are not involved. I don’t expect all those critics of Obama to suddenly apologise – it’s not in their nature – they will no doubt call him weak and indecisive, but through his careful practice he has, in soaking up the flak, proved far stronger – and smarter – than they could ever be. In doing so, he has burnished the image of the USA as a benevolent force and made the UN relevant as well, the latter especially infuriating to conservatives, who believe that the true world government should be American and see the UN as a rival. Now, the attention switches to Libya with the West feeling a lot more relieved than they did two days ago. Technically, assassination of Gaddafi has been given legal cover, so long as it is not done with boots on Libyan terra firma. On the brink of defeat, Libya’s democratic revolution could now triumph.

I am quite angry about a good many things right now – not about things that have happened such as the Japanese earthquake/tsunami or are happening such as the perceived military success of the Gaddafi regime. I am furious at the vacillation and disingenuousness of the elites of the international community.
The terrible tragedy of the natural disaster afflicting Japan is truly saddening but what is maddening is not just the pusillanimity of the Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan, but the cover-up involving the nuclear power stations. Japan has had two lost decades but the institutional drift is indicative of this.
The Sir Humphreys of the Japanese civil service have lost the plot and no-one can replace them – in the boom times of the 1950s to the 1980s, laissez-faire and a new prime minister every other year are not such big issues, but in the 1990s crunch a new, dynamic leader needs to pick the country up by the scruff of its neck and deliver it from its sticky conundrum, a Winston Churchill, a Lyndon Johnson or a Harry Truman. Instead, the country has gone into a slow death spiral. Two years ago, the Japanese government was told about “potentially fatal flaws” in the reactors now in crisis. What did they do? Not only hush it up, but when one power station in the west of the country was closed down through safety fears, the government went to court to open it again and won. Now the prime minister criticises the company that owns the stricken Fukushima plant, but corporate and political Japan are responsible for this mess.
The Japanese people voted for change when they threw out the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and replaced them with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The trouble was most DPJ powerbrokers were LDP defectors. The election was a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Now China, which is famed for secrecy and not meddling in the affairs of other countries, has demanded that the Japanese government hide nothing (as they did not report the fourth explosion at the Fukushima plant for twenty hours).
Another incidence of serious malfunctioning of government is situating a disaster recovery centre fifty yards from the shore in an inlet town; to be sure, it was four kilometres from the open sea, but in the event of any tsunami that would just funnel the wave to be even higher. One resident remembered the 1960 tsunami and was shocked that 1,000 people huddled in this one storey building – lambs to the slaughter if ever there was such a case. He managed to persuade 60 people to leave, to take refuge in the four storey town hall, but even then it was too late. 40 were swept away before they reached the building, five drowned in the stairwell as the wave overwhelmed the first two storeys and only the heroic 73 year old man and 15 others reached the roof and survived. The Japanese had been betrayed by the complacency of the authorities with the ludicrous siting of the earthquake emergency building and such was their obedience and trust in bureaucracy that they herded in there, instead of fleeing to high ground.
To top it all, Japan has debt equivalent to 227% of its economy with the most rapidly ageing population in the world. It may rebuild, its economy may bounce back, but the dead people will remain dead and there could be utter nuclear disaster at Fukushima. And it is not going to get any better in the medium and long-term. When the multiple inquiries begin (as there surely has to be more than one), the shit deserves to hit the fan for how the Japanese elite failed their people.

As for the Libya crisis, I am seriously annoyed that even though the Arab League has faced down the anxieties of Syria and Algeria and endorsed a no-fly zone, the proposal is still a non-flier. Incrementally, the USA is moving towards it, Dr Susan Rice, its UN ambassador, seemingly advocating air strikes as part of the package, while Bob Gates drags his heels hoping the uprising will be crushed before the USA has another policing operation. Yet the cynicism of Germany is striking and this is displayed by its pandering to the green movement by ditching its policy of extending the life of nuclear generators for three months while a review is conducted, a review that will conveniently conclude after local elections. After the flak they took for a (half-hearted) bail-out of the Euro currency’s strugglers, in taking an anti-war stance – or portraying their decisions as an anti-war stance – Merkel, Westerwelle and the rest of their cabinet are putting their own political lives before those of the Libyan people. Russia and China are using Germany as a stooge for their own opposition – they don’t want a no-fly zone because secretly they fear they have to use air power against their own civilians, whether in the North Caucasus or Tibet/Xinjiang (if not elsewhere) and don’t want to set a UN precedent. Britain and France have tied their hands with the first UN resolution because without a further one authorising a no-fly zone, they will increase the damage to the UN’s credibility. Yet the blame doesn’t lie with them or the Arab League, but with the contemptuous approach to human life and dignity expressed by certain elites. The blood of the Libyan people if Gaddafi triumphs will be on the heads of Bob Gates (not that he cares) and those of the German, Russian and Chinese governments (not that they care either).

Finally, I am infuriated by the pettiness of Labour Party elites in this country who oppose AV, yet are turning it into a personality contest. I can understand the Tories seeking to nobble it because they are extremely unlikely ever to get more than 50% of the vote and so will never again have it all their own way with the country if this passes. Tony Blair hailed left-liberal dominance in the 21st century, but flunked cementing that with voting reform because of the early opposition from Gordon Brown. The latter later had a deathbed conversion in 2010, but it was too late before the election produced a hung – or balanced – parliament.
The Labour politicians who argue against AV are exactly of the same hue of Tories in that they want sole power for themselves, without having to share it with other parties. They know that a good way to try and ensure the reform is voted down is to link Nick Clegg’s name to it, given that he has gone from political hero to zero in twelve months, mostly because of the spending cuts and the broken promise on student fees. One of the most momentous referendums in the last 40 years (indeed since the 1975 one on EEC membership, the only countrywide one) and they boil it down to throwing mud because they want to hurt the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg through not joining into coalition with them (even though Labour were monumentally unprepared, least of all ready to concede policy ground). Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face, if indeed they are truthful in what they say. As campaign reformer Ken Livingstone – once against AV but only because he was in favour of the single transferable vote – said this morning, why hit the monkey, when you can hit the organ grinder (i.e. David Cameron) instead? Hear, hear!

Middle Eastern Traffic Report

We’re hearing news of roadblocks in Bahrain getting in the way of Saudi troops, with some resulting casualties, though the Pearl roundabout is clear and local authorities are using all means necessary to keep the thoroughfares clear.
In Libya, the road from Tripoli to Benghazi is essentially clear, traffic taking this route because of a large obstruction further north in Germany, blocking G8 and NATO paths. There are a few road bumps of international condemnation but these are not proving insurmountable.
In Yemen, a junction has been reached as the ruler is refusing to make any further concessions to protestors cramming highways, receiving outside diplomatic help in their struggle, although Oman is looking far more hassle-free after a measure of democracy was granted.
A few minor disturbances aside, all other roads in the Middle East are looking fine.

Living in the past

The letter to The Daily Telegraph, undersigned by prominent historians, that argues against the adoption of Alternative Vote may lend credence to opposing a change but only from the credulous. Professor Niall Ferguson is such a combative ideologue that I’m not surprised he would give his name to such a jejeune idea. Dr David Starkey is famed for not mincing his words but as a Tudor historian I’m not sure his area of expertise extends into the intricacies of democracy. Anthony Beevor is a man I have time for but I think his sympathies lean to the right. And this is the trouble with the whole letter – it is dishonest.
It claims to support the philosophical concept of ‘one man, one vote’ (though stripping that back to ancient Greece from where it harks – you historians know what is coming – why not exclude women, not to mention slaves?), yet I bet, left or right, the political affiliations of these historians are of a kind that they fear their party of choice would never enjoy a monopoly of power again. In order to show that ‘extremists and non-parties’ would gain representation (are all non-party members bad?), they quote Churchill like he is an oracle, when he denounced AV saying it would produce the most worthless candidates (though in his era, one Neville Chamberlain became prime minister under first past the post). It is like when the satire Brass Eye tricked radio presenter Dr Fox into saying “There’s no evidence for it but it’s a fact.” Why not quote Churchill about the defences of Singapore or whether India should be independent? He inspired this country to victory in one of its darkest hours but he didn’t always get it right.
From the other side of the argument comes Lord Owen, campaigning against AV ‘reluctantly’ because it is not Proportional Representation. He argues that AV is not an incremental step to PR because political systems need to crystallise and have stability and so AV may indeed retard PR (which is part one person, one vote, though I bet those historians who wrote in don’t support PR). I’m not content with AV and certainly AV+ (which is already used to elect the London mayor – with the current incumbent, how’s that for your extremist fringe?) and PR are more preferable options but it is better than nothing. It is a fool’s paradise to think a rejection of AV would strengthen the case for PR, the eighty years since the last referendum on voting reform proof positive of that. Anyway, there is still debate on how to elect the Lords when that finally get changed – PR could play a part in electing the upper chamber. Ultimately though, people will have one shot at this and if it is not adopted, will set the tone for decades. Half a loaf is better than no loaf.

While a second, shattering earthquake in a matter of weeks takes Libya off the top of the headlines, great carnage is still taking place there in the North African state. Which is why yesterday, at last, such an easy step to make has been taken – France has recognised the rebel council (I’m tempted to call it the Rebel Alliance) as the legitimate government of Libya. The trouble doing so is if Colonel Gaddafi’s forces triumph over the protestors – as America’s top foreign intelligence official has said is indeed the most likely outcome. Then an awkward diplomatic stand-off lingers and France would be frozen out of any part of Libya’s development. Paris has crossed the Rubicon.
This would explain the reluctance of other western nations to follow suit, while President Nicolas Sarkozy is talking up surgical strikes on the Gaddafi command structure. France could not do this by itself – it would have to be agreed by a large majority of NATO. Unfortunately, this is not forthcoming at the latest reckoning. Turkey is the most vocal in opposing any measures, as it continues its Ottoman Caliphate syndrome, palling up with autocrats in Iran and now Libya against the populations of these countries and the outside world. Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s foreign minister, openly says he doesn’t want to get involved in another war, after Afghanistan; it may reflect his country’s post-WWII pacifist stance, but they’ve also just lost their defence minister to a plagiarism scandal, so his successor is still learning their brief, plus in the lands of the Hindu Kush, German troops were criticised for their copious beer-drinking – another war and alcohol poisoning might go up. Robert Gates is gloomy about enforcing the arms embargo, let alone anything more proactive – an arch-realist brought in to tame the excess of ideology in Gulf War II, he is also the calibre of man who would stand by impassively and not raise a finger as Saddam Hussein crushed the 1991 uprisings, following Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO chief, raises the buzz phrase ‘no-fly zone’ only ever in conjunction with a ‘UN mandate’, proving he either doesn’t understand or pretending to not understand international law. You don’t need a UN mandate if the government of a country invites you in.
The rebels are clamouring for outside help. Recognise the Libyan opposition as the government, like France and you avoid breaking international law. Russia spuriously cited this when it invaded Georgia in 2008, claiming it was asked to intervene by self-governing administrations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia against Georgina ‘aggression’, even though only Nicaragua and Moscow itself recognised these statelets (and Russia had stoked up the tension in the first place). On such a rationale, NATO could play the Russians at their own game. The elephant in the room during Rasmussen’s conference call is that there is no appetite to do so. In Brussels, they are hoping the Russians and the Chinese vote down the measure before the Security Council (and a no-fly zone would not ground helicopter gunships, illustrating the size of pygmy ambition).
Further south, an unusually muscular UN operation is taking place in Côte d’Ivoire. The UN ignores rogue president Laurent Gbagbo’s pronouncements against it, such as a no-fly zone on UN aircraft. This no-nonsense attitude is partly because of the widespread recognition of Alassane Ouattara’s democratic victory and partly because they ended an eight-year civil war and do not want a repeat. Yet still the country heads in that direction as regional and international actors in the political sphere sit on their hands, merely scolding Gbagbo, like they tut over Gaddafi
Meanwhile, our by-the-numbers Foreign Secretary, William Hague, blethers that the Libyan crisis is the biggest test to ‘Europe’ (however that is defined) for 20 years, i.e. since the fall of the Berlin Wall/Soviet Union. So the Bosnian and Kosovan wars, where genocide occurred for the first time on the continent since 1945, obviously do not figure in his mind. British foreign policy oscillates wildly, while its action lags behind that of everyone else. I opposed the 2003 Iraq conflict because we were going to war with transparent lies, a false prospectus and the wrong real reasons. The 1991 moment had passed. The hostilities were supposed to serve notice on dictators, yet (as in many ways) it has proved counter-productive, with the west weary on further intervention. Ordinary Libyans instigated a shot at democracy – it was not imposed from outside and top-down. Pragmatism and romanticism must be wedded in NATO policy, rather than pragmatism reigning supreme because otherwise Gaddafi could be doing the same in Libya quite soon and who want that?

The cataclysmic earthquake off the coast of Japan is shocking in its intensity and scope – all earthquakes are but this is of a completely different order. This is the big one. The one they’ve been waiting for in Tokyo since 1923. It is surely the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. 8.9 on the Richter scale is almost off it and that measurement is exponential. This was 1,000 times stronger than the Christchurch quake. They knew Kobe wasn’t it and that was hit by a 7.2 tremor. The devastation will rage around the Pacific Ocean, 10 metre tsunami waves being reported, everything being swept away in its path. Any aftershock will be of the magnitude of a major quake in itself. But in spite of this, it could have been so much more worse had it happened under a major city – if Tokyo-Yokohama had been in the same situation as Christchurch it would have been wiped out, like in 1923. Let the dead be mourned, the injured consoled and hope the material damage is not permanent or long-lasting (the nuclear power stations seem to have survived) and be grateful that, as this was going to happen at some point, the epicentre was probably where the damage would be at its most limited, great as it currently appears to be.

The knockabout that occurs on BBC Radio Five(Live) in the morning is one I usually eschew in favour of Radio Four anchors making mincemeat of their guests. But when I turned on the radio it was still on the setting for sport that I had left it the previous night; I might have turned over but I had come in at the start of a discussion. Moreover, it was predicated on a very interesting announcement – that the coalition was finally following through on the Brown government’s proposal to ban all cigarette packets from public view in shops and pubs and possibly to push ahead with plain packaging.
Nicky Campbell had with him to mull over this policy was Phillip Davies, MP for Shipley and a spokesman for ASH, the anti-smoking lobby. Campbell allowed Mr Davies to open the salvo, deriding ASH as zealots and declaiming that the ‘nanny state’ had gone too far. ASH’s spokesman - whose name I forget because his arguments were at the forefront of his speaking, rather than his personality – responded with an impressive body of health charities and medical institutions that backed the government line and then went on to cite biological, physiological and psychological trials.
In fact, he so comprehensively blew Davies out of the water that when Campbell switched back to him, there was a stunned silence of several seconds, before he responded with abuse, once more calling ASH zealots and repeating almost verbatim what he had said originally. This gave the ASH man the upper hand for any rational people listening, I should imagine and he further developed his line of attack by saying the concept of plain packaging had been tried out in places like Canada and Ireland with the effect of lowering tobacco consumption because warnings stand out more clearly and that the industry that supplies this still differentiates – illegally – with colours to suggest that one brand is less harmful than another.
Davies, clearly one step behind, ignored all that the ASH spokesman had just enumerated and, with another swipe at them as ‘extremists’, moaned that there was no evidence for ASH saying what they were saying because no country had implemented this policy anywhere in the world (he would later contradict himself). Thus he dismissed all scientific research – a strain of English anti-intellectualism? – because he had been a businessman (he did not declare what his business was).
The ASH spokesman was becoming exasperated, partially through the relentless ad hominem insults, as well as shocked that someone could say such a disingenuous thing, that because it hasn’t been tried anywhere, it can’t work. Back came Mr Davies declaring that ASH’s sole aim was to ban smoking altogether. Campbell, perhaps sensing the inadequacy of the MP put the question forcefully that this was ASH’s real purpose. The spokesman hit back rubbishing that as counter-productive – ASH’s aim was to help prevent people smoking in the first place and to offer support who wanted to quit (65% apparently), he said – but he allowed himself to be sidelined away from the issue but the ferocious ignorance of Davies, rhetorically asking if Mr Davies thought adults smoking in cars with children present was something the latter supported.
Davies coolly swatted this away, saying it was a matter for parental responsibility – a double-edged sword, for while Davies may get all the advantages of life in his upbringing, some people are not fit to have progeny – then going on to say that tobacco purchase was not an impulse purchase like cream cakes: “Oh, I think I’ll have some cigarettes today” (another false argument because it is an addiction and the policy is to discourage take-up in the first place; people don’t say “I think I’ll have some heroin today”); before continuing to prove that he was a slow thinker, responding to the last statement but one of the ASH spokesman. Here is where he contradicted himself, by saying when Ireland introduced plain packaging (so it HAS been tried in other countries), the seizure of contraband was a record haul, yet at least he had provided something firmer than opinionated ire.
Once more, the ASH man trounced this, saying that the evidence of Ireland was that contraband seizure was the same as this supposed record haul for the ten years previous to the introduction of the policy. He was losing his temper with Davies though (not unjustifiably) and angrily asked if Davies was against seatbelts being worn compulsorily in cars.
Now the supposedly Honourable Member for Shipley was in his element of a slanging match. He manoeuvred around the charge, saying that he had an opinion on seatbelts but was for another time (how convenient and notice how he did not answer it – he probably does oppose seatbelts being worn in cars as law) called ASH fanatics and said that the nanny state had gone too far. This was supposed to be the final word, but so infuriated was the ASH man that he got in “you’re just repeating the same insults and arguments.” This was gratuitous for the listener but pleasurable to hear Davies having it stuck to him. Davies, illustrating his childish mind, tried to have the final word but clashed with Campbell bringing the guillotine down on the debate and so was not fully intelligible (though arguably he had been so all the way through).
It is easy to jeer anonymously from the backbenches at your opponents, less easy to offer cogent arguments when your mind is polluted with excessive ideology. I must make clear that this is not a transcript but I have portrayed it as accurately as possible and it really was true that Davies was the perfect exponent of the Nasty Party Tory MP – rude, smug and not making much sense. It is telling that he is at odds with his own government. He probably expected the ASH spokesman to directly impugn him, asking him if he was a smoker (to which he would probably, triumphantly, declare he was not, rather he was a defender of ‘freedom’) or where his campaign funds came from (again, another imagined triumph when he could deny it). Davies did not expect to be dissected with facts and evidence. The ASH spokesman showed considerable forbearance before finally cracking under the invective by being diverted away from the issue. There is a case for libertarianism, sometimes the nanny state does go too far and I’m sure a FOREST spokesperson would have made the case for choice between companies and their brands or the pernicious effect alcohol can have (easy targets omitted a mention by Davies). But in the matter of public health and misleading branding, a distinction has to be made and I’m glad the government is doing this. The real zealot/extremist/fanatic was Davies. Despite his nameless persona to me, any person of sound persuasion would have been very impressed by the Ash spokesman and more inclined to go with the government for the first time in a long while.

With Libya's frequent interference in the past with their southern neighbour, allied to all the mercenaries originating from their country, were the rebels to triumph over Gaddafi, it would certainly leave a hanging Chad...