question:The definition of white British is far from simple. The report distinguishes between Irish, traveller of Irish heritage, Gypsy/Roma and Any other white background (see CSC table 2 page 13). The Any other white background is the largest. It is not clear from the report how the white British were defined, for example, a child of white immigrants might well consider his or herself white British. Who would whether they were or were not British? The numbers of some of the ethnic minority groups cited are small, for example, at the end of Key Stage 4 (the end of GCSE courses) in 2013 there were only 168 Chinese in the country who pupils who qualified for FSM. (see CSC table 2 page 13). …measuring working class performance in education through FSM data can be misleading. The Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE) drew our attention to a mismatch between the proportion of children who were eligible for free school meals and the proportion of adults who would self-define as working class:17 in 2012/13, 15% of pupils at the end of key stage 4 were known to be eligible for free school meals,18 compared with 57% of British adults who defined themselves as ‘working class’ as part of a survey by the National Centre for Social Research.The CRRE warned that projecting the educational performance of a small group of economically deprived pupils onto what could otherwise be understood to be a much larger proportion of the population had “damaging consequences” on public understanding of the issue. The logical result of equating FSM with working class was that 85% of children were being characterised as middle class or above. The white British group will be overwhelmingly drawn from the most deprived part of that group’s population, while many of the ethnic minority groups held up as superior to the white British children, will have a large component of people who are not drawn from the lower social reaches of their society, but are poor simply because they are either first generation immigrants or the children of first generation immigrants and have not established themselves in well paid work – think of all the tales the mainstream media and politicians regale the British with about immigrant graduates doing menial jobs. These parents will both have more aspiration for their children and a greater ability to assist their children with their schoolwork. 13. A report for the Children’s Society noted that the criteria for FSM mean that parents working 16 or more hours per week (24 hours for couples from April 2012) lose their entitlement to FSM since they are eligible for working tax credit; as a result there are around 700,000 children living in poverty who are not entitled to receive free school meals. In addition, not all those who may be eligible for FSM register for it; a recent report for the Department for Education estimated under-registration to be 11% in 2013. This figure varies across the country: in the North East under-registration is estimated to be 1%, compared to 18% in the East of England and 19% in the South East. 4. Greater resources, both material advantages and better quality staff, are being put into schools which have a very large ethnic minority component than schools which are predominantly filled with white British children. This is occurring both as a matter of deliberate government policy and through not-for-profit corporations such as charities. The amounts involved for a school can be considerable. Suppose that a secondary school with 1,000 children has 40% of its pupils qualifying for FSM. That would bring an additional £374,000 to the school in this financial year. At present £2.5 billion is being spent on the pupil premium. According to a Dept of Education (DoE) investigation published in 2013, Evaluation of Pupil Premium Research Report, a good deal of this money is being spent on ethnic minorities and those without English as a first language (see tables 2.1 and 2.2, pages27 and 30). The pupil premium can be used to provide extra staff, better staff, improved equipment after school activities and so on. Schools can allocate the Pupil Premium money at their discretion and often make the identification of where money has gone next to impossible because they do things such as merging the Pupil Premium money with money from other budgets and joining forces with other schools in the area to provide provision (see pages 14/15 in the DoE report). It is probable that the Pupil Premium money brought into schools by white British working-class FSM children is being used, at least in part, to benefit ethnic minorities. The converse is wildly improbable. Ethnic minorities are concentrated in particular areas and particular schools. This makes it more likely that ethnic children will go to schools with a higher proportion of free school meal pupils than schools dominated by white pupils. That will provide significantly greater funding for an ethnic minority majority school than for one dominated by white Britons, most of whom will not qualify for the Pupil Premium.. Because ethnic minority families, and especially those of first generation immigrants, are substantially larger on average than those of white Britons, the likelihood of ethnic minority children qualifying for FSM will be greater than it is for white Britons because the larger the family the more likely a child is to qualify for FSM. This will boost the additional money from the pupils premium going to ethnic minority dominated schools. The Government’s response to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s first annual report noted that Teach First will be training 1,500 graduates in 2014 to 2015 and placing them in the most challenging schools, and that as of 2014/15 Teach First will be placing teachers in every region of England. Apart from specific programmes such as the Pupil Premium and special training for teachers to prepare them what are euphemistically called “challenging schools” which end up disproportionately favouring ethnic minority pupils, there is also scope within the normal funding of state schools to favour ethnic minorities because head teachers have a good deal of discretion in how funds are spent. That applies with knobs on to Academies and Free Schools. There is also a considerable difference in funding between the funding of areas with large ethic minority populations, especially black and Asian groups, and areas with largely white populations, for example, between East Anglia and London: “ The government has announced plans to raise per-pupil funding 3.7pc in Norfolk to £4,494, 7pc in Cambridgeshire to £4,225 and 2.5pc in Suffolk to £4,347 next year following a campaign by MPs. 5. The effect of political correctness. With good reason any teacher, and especially white teachers, will be fearful of not seeming to be devoutly political correct. They know they are at the mercy of other teachers, parents and pupils and know that an accusation of racism from any source could well end their teaching career at worst and at best seriously disrupt their lives while a complaint is being investigated. In addition, many teachers will be emotionally attached to political correctness generally and to multiculturalism in particular. In such circumstances it is reasonable to suspect that teachers in schools with a mix of ethnic minority and white British children will devote more time and patience to ethnic minority pupils than to white children. They may do this without conscious intent, with either fear or the ideological commitment making such a choice seem the natural one. Such preferential treatment for ethnic minority children is facilitated by the large amount of continuous assessment involved in GCSE. (This is supposedly being reduced but the results of the change has not yet worked through to the end of a GCSE cycle. Teachers routinely help children to re-write work which does not come up to par, in some cases re-doing the work themselves. Teachers have also been caught helping pupils to cheat during exams. The opportunity and the temptation to help ethnic minority children is there and the pressure of political correctness may cause opportunity to become actuality. 6. The disruptive effect on schools of a large number of pupils from different backgrounds with English as a second language, the type of schools where the headmaster boasts “We have 100 languages spoken here”. The most likely white British children to be in such schools are those from the poorest homes which means they qualify as FSM pupils. They will be lost in these Towers of Babel not only because often they will be in the minority, but also because, unlike children with English as a second language or ethnic minority English speakers who will have a good chance of enhanced tuition, the white British FSM pupils will not enjoy such a privilege and may be actually ignored to a large extent because of the desire of the staff to assist ethnic minority children. 7. The downplaying of British culture. The school curriculum in Britain and especially in England (where the vast majority of the British live) is shaped to reflect the politically correct worldview. This means that ethnic minority culture and history are frequently pushed ahead of British culture and history. The larger the percentage of ethnic minorities in a school, the greater will be the tendency to marginalise the white British pupils, who will almost certainly be drawn largely from those qualifying for FSM. They will be deracinated and become culturally disorientated. To this school propaganda is added the politically correct and anti-British, anti-white propaganda which is pumped out ceaselessly by mainstream politicians and the media. This will reinforce the idea that being white and British is somehow at best inferior to that of ethnic minority cultures and at worst something to be ashamed of, something to be despised, something which is a danger to its possessor. As far as the general public is concerned, the Select Committee report is saying the white working-class children – all of them not just those receiving FSM – are doing less well than ethnic minority children. The reason for this is simple, the mainstream media have reported the story in a way which would promote such a belief, both in their headlines and the stories themselves. A comparison between the white British population as a whole and the ethnic minority populations as a whole would be nearer to reality, but it would still be comparing apples and oranges for the reasons given above. The ethnic minority children would still be likely to have on average parents who would not be representative of the ancestral populations they came from, political correctness would still drive teachers to favour ethnic minority pupils, continuous assessment would still allow teachers to illegally aid ethnic minorities, heads could still decide to divert more funds towards ethnic minorities and the promotion of ethnic minority cultures and history would still exist. What could be done to remedy matters? Continuous assessment should stop and end of course synoptic exams substituted. Ethnic minority children should not have more spent on them than white British children. School funding in different areas should be broadly similar per capita. British culture and history should be the dominant teaching driver. Political correctness should be removed from the curriculum generally. As for future studies, these should be controlled in a much more subtle manner than simply using FSM as a criterion. Any study of all or any part of group should control for parents’ education, income, the amount of money spent on each pupil, the teacher pupil ratio, the quality of the teachers and the general facilities of the school. Those suggestions would not entirely cure the problem, but it would be good start to both getting at the truth and ending the demonization of the white working-class which has gathered pace ever since the Labour Party decided to drop the white working-class as their client base and substitute for them the politically correct groups of gays, feminists and most potently ethnic minorities. The first Gulf War was the last Western intervention with force under the old Cold War rules. It was limited to evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and establishing a no-fly zone established over the Kurdish part of Iraq. No attempt was made to overthrow Hussein. Indeed, the reverse is the case because the first President Bush deliberately lifted the no fly order in the immediate aftermath of the War to enable Hussein to re-establish control, the USA’s judgement being that it was the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being Iraq as a client state of Iran. This was still recognisably the world of Communist East versus capitalist West. The wars which eventually occurred from the splitting of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death gradually increased the West’s liberal imperialist tendencies and culminated in NATO bombing – action unauthorised by the UN and illegal under NATO’s own rules because Slobodan Milosevic offered no threat to a NATO member – what remained of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. There was also something new, the desire to remake territories in the West’s image by imposing conditions on a sovereign state over part of its territory, in this case Kosovo. The first steps towards ignoring the UN Charter’s protection of national sovereignty (chapter 7) had been taken not merely in actuality, but intellectually. The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or foment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”. When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy – look at South Africa. Looking around the world there are many regimes that are undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts. If we wanted to right every wrong that we see in the modern world then we would do little else than intervene in the affairs of other countries. We would not be able to cope. First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe. Milosovec lost a Presidential election in 2000, was arrested on April 1, 2001 and extradited to the Hague Tribunal on June 28, where he died in detention in March 2006, before his trial was completed. Today, more than fifteen years after the end of the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, the ‘Balkan question’ remains more than ever a ‘European question’. In the eyes of many Europeans in the 1990s, Bosnia was the symbol of a collective failure, while Kosovo later became a catalyst for an emerging Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In the last decade, with the completion of the process of redrawing the map of the region, the overall thrust of the EU’s Balkans policy has moved from an agenda dominated by security issues related to the war and its legacies to an agenda focused on the perspective of the Western Balkan states’ accession to the European Union, to which there has been a formal political commitment on the part of all EU Member States since the Thessaloniki Summit in June 2003. The framework was set, the political elites in the region were – at least verbally – committed to making Europe a priority and everyone was supposedly familiar with the policy tools thanks to the previous wave of Eastern enlargement. With the region’s most contentious issues apparently having been defused, the EU could move from stability through containment towards European integration. There are favourable trends to make this possible: the EU has emerged as the unchallenged international actor in the Balkans; the region, exhausted by a decade of conflict, is recovering stability and the capacity to cooperate; the EU has no other equally plausible enlargement agenda in sight and could use the direct involvement of some of its Member States in the region to facilitate the accession process. What the 1999 essay does do is show how the move from non-intervention to regime change and nation building was well under way fifteen years ago, with all the disastrous consequences we have seen since, including creating false hopes in many countries democracy could be magicked up simply by removing a dictator. Rousseau wrote that people must be forced to be free for their own good : the Blair Doctrine states that people must be forced for their own good to live by the rules of political correctness. Now that the big boys toys have been put back in the cupboard and Mr Jamie Shea is returning to run his whelk stall in the Mile End Road, we really do need to ask why this bizarre act of aggression by Nato occurred because it has profound implications for Britain. What was it all about? Well, we all know that, don’t we? To put the Albanians back into Kosovo, stupid! Wrong! The war started because Milosevic would not accept the Nato proposals drawn up at Rambouillet, which was scarcely surprising for they might have been designed to ensure their refusal. Not only did the Rambouillet Proposals give foreign soldiers the right to enter any part of Yugoslavia, they provided for a referendum on independence for the Kosovan population. Add to that the demand that Serb troops withdraw from Kosovo and the refusal to allow Russian troops to be part of a peacekeeping force, and it is all too easy to see why Milosevic refused them. Moreover, the Rambouillet proposals were not put forward as a basis for negotiation, but as a fait accompli. They then became the subject of a naked ultimatum, issued effectively by the US in the egregious person of Madeleine Albright. The Rambouillet proposals would have reduced Yugoslavia to the status of a dependent territory, with the virtual guarantee that the land (Kosovo) which had the greatest emotional significance for the majority Serb population would be lost to the hated Albanian minority. Moreover, they had the knowledge that the loss of Kosovo through a referendum would almost certainly result in the expulsion of the two hundred thousand Serbs normally resident in Kosovo, assuming that they had not already left after the withdrawal of Serbian troops. Milosevic was offered the prospect of tremendous humiliation and nothing else. If Nato had wished to ensure a war they could scarcely have done better. As Henry Kissinger remarked in a interview with Boris Johnson of the Daily Telegraph (28/6/99,) Rambouillet was a provocation. But the Rambouillet proposals were only the immediate cause of the conflict. The war was really about the imposition of Liberal Internationalist ideals. Since 1945, the Liberal Internationalist cause have been growing in strength until it has become the ostensible ideology of the ruling elites throughout the West. During the Cold War the territorial ambitions of the Liberal Internationalists were considerably constrained. Since 1989 those constraints have been removed. The result has been an unhappy sequence of interventions, covered by the fig leaf of UN colours, which have demonstrated the utter impotence of the Liberal Internationalist creed by invariably creating situations the exact opposite of those intended by the interveners: Somalia is a mess of anarchy, Bosnia a UN protectorate with the warring ethnic groups largely segregated and future conflict just waiting to happen. The war against Serbia marked a new stage in Liberal Internationalist ambitions: naked aggression was undertaken without even the indecent cover of the UN fig leaf. The persistent failure of international intervention has not deterred the Liberal Internationalists because, like all fanatic ideologues, the Liberal Internationalist is incapable of admitting that his creed is plain wrong no matter have often events prove it to be so. For the Liberal Internationalist any failure is simply the result of insufficient resources and time, a spur to behave in an ever more totalitarian manner; from peacekeeping through outright war to de facto colonial occupation. Consequently those with the power in the West continue to intervene ineptly in conflicts inherently irresolvable in liberal Internationalist terms. Their response to failure or the contrary evidence of events is to embark on ever more intervention regardless of the havoc caused or the long term consequences. What the war was not about was morality, despite Blair and Clinton’s inordinate and deeply risible posturing. (In fact war is never about morality. It is always about territory, aggrandisement, the removal of competitors and the imposition of the victor’s will.) The nations attacking Yugoslavia had stood by during many greater man made horrors such as the massacres in Rwanda. Most pertinently, the West had not merely stood by while hundreds of thousands of Serbs were expelled from Croatia, but in the guise of the UN had actively assisted in that expulsion by providing arms and airpower to support the Croat military. Most tellingly, and most repellently, because it was utterly predictable, Nato has not meaningfully protected the Kosovan Serbs since the end of the war. Nor could they have had any reasonable expectation of doing so, for the size of even the projected peace keeping force (50,000 – which numbers have not been met) was obviously inadequate to mount a general police action against an Albania population of nearly two million in which there were plentiful arms. A cynic might think that Nato’s aims were from the beginning to produce a Kosovo ethnically cleansed of Serbs. The course of the war laid bare the stupidity, incomprehension, incompetence and amorality of the Nato members’ leaders. The objective facts say that the conflict has greatly worsened a naturally fraught situation. Before the war, the vast majority of the Albanian population of Kosovo was in Kosovo living in their homes. Since the war began the, vast majority have either left the country or remain in Kosovo having been driven from their homes. Thus, just as the Second World War signalled the beginning of the Holocaust, so Nato’s action signalled that of the Kosovan Albanians’ tragedy. Without the war, it is improbable to the point of certainty that the greatest movement of a population in Europe since 1945 would have occurred. The hypocrisy of the whole business was graphically demonstrated in the Nato members’ attitude towards the refugees. The public posturing on the need to provide for the refugees was all too clearly balanced by the fear that any large scale import of refugees to Nato countries outside the Balkans would arouse considerable dissent in those countries. Amongst many stomach heaving moments, Clare Short’s protestations that Britain did not want to move the refugees away from the Balkans simply because Britain did not wish to unwillingly assist Milosevic rank very high. The double standards, both amongst politicians and the media have continued with the end of the war, as the Liberal Ascendency quietly tolerates ethnic cleansing of the Kosovo Serbs and the gross acts of revenge taken by the Kosovo Albanians. What if there had been no war? Judged by what had gone before, there would have been continued harassment of Kosovan Albanians by Serb paramilitaries and some action by the regular Serb forces, the latter primarily directed against the KLA. One simple fact alone gives the lie to Nato’s claims that wholesale ethnic cleansing would have occurred regardless of Nato intervention. Prior to the war, Milosevic had ten years to undertake the task and did not attempt it. Fine ideals are not fine at all if they are so out of keeping with reality that they produce evil ends. Who won the war? Well, let us follow the Dragnet example and just look at the facts. Milosevic remains in control of Yugoslavia minus Kosovo. Two of the prime demands of the Rambouillet proposals – that the Kosovo population be given a referendum on independence within three years and the right of peacekeeping troops to go anywhere in Yugoslavia – have been dropped. There is also to be no referendum and the peacekeeping force will operate only within Kosovo. In addition, Russian troops are involved in the peacekeeping force, a token Serb presence will be allowed in Kosovo and there are signs that the force may eventually come under UN not Nato auspices. Those are very significant political gains for Milosevic. Let us make the assumptions which most favour Nato. That the agreement which was reached between Milosevic and Nato was not ambiguous. That Milosevic will keep his word. That the peace keeping force will be Nato led under a unified command. That the Russians involved in the peace keeping will not subvert the process on the ground. That money will be forthcoming in sufficient amounts to rebuild Kosovo. That the KLA will allow themselves to be disarmed. A collection of pretty improbable occurrences. But no matter, let us grant them. What then? Even under such propitious and unlikely circumstances, it is highly improbable that Kosovo will be quickly returned to normality. The destruction of housing and the spoliation of farm land alone make that immensely difficult, but given the will and the money, the material damage might be repaired. But material renaissance is not the heart of the problem. That lies in the all too simple fact of the existence of two incompatible ethnic groups occupying the same territory, both sides replete with ancestral hatreds and recent hurts. In such circumstances a peaceful multicultural Kosovo is a fantasy. We have the example of Bosnia before us. Stripped of all cant, it is now a good old fashioned League of Nations Protectorate, a mandated territory. It has the experience of several years of UN control. Yet the vast majority of the displaced populations in Bosnia have not returned to their homes and the various ethnic groups there lead largely segregated lives. But the post bombing situation in Kosovo is unlikely to be anything like so favourable as I have described. The KLA have shown no more willingness to generally disarm than the IRA. The agreement which was reached is not unambiguous. Milosevic cannot be relied to keep his part of the bargain. The Russians have shown that they are not willing to accept Nato command unconditionally. Money in the quantities suggested as needed for rebuilding (anything between 15-25 billion pounds) may well prove to be too great a hurdle for politicians to sell to their publics who are being told of the need for cuts in welfare – The USA and Europe are already squabbling over who should bear the cost of rebuilding Kosovo. Milosevic also has one great general political advantage; he knows that political life amongst the Nato powers is ephemeral. While he may be in power in five years time, the majority of his opponents will not. He can afford to sit and wait until a propitious moment comes to regain all or part of Kosovo. Milosevic’s position is not as strong as that of Saddam Hussain in purely authoritarian terms, but he has a vital quality which Saddam does not, namely his authority does not rely entirely on force. Before the war started the Nato leaders must have known that a western led occupation of Kosovo would simply replace one form of repression with another. At best they could expect a replica of Bosnia: at worst, an ethnic cleansing of Serbian Kosovans. Since the end of the war, all too predictably the worst has occurred as the western disregard shown for the welfare of ordinary Serbs elsewhere in the Balkans has been repeated. The peacekeeping force has stood ineffectually by whilst Kosovo is cleansed of Serbs by the KLA and their associates. Perhaps no one has won the war, but that is often the way of wars. The real question is who has suffered the most damage. At the moment it may look like Milosevic, not least because the Nato countries in truth had nothing material to gain and everything to lose from the War. Yet Milosevic has reduced the Rambouillet demands, probably tightened his control on Yugoslav politics and large parts of Kosovo has been ethnically cleansed. The Nato countries have made significant concessions and committed themselves to massive expenditure and the deployment of troops indefinitely. This will both take money from their own electorates and influence their future foreign policies. It is a strange sort of victory if victory it be for Nato. For Britain there is much about which to be ashamed and worried. We have bombed defenceless targets which plainly were not in any meaningful sense military. This places us in an impossible moral position in dealing with terrorist action. What moral argument could we have against Serb reprisal bombs in Britain? That it is wrong to bomb innocent civilians? More worryingly Blair has shown himself to be an unashamed warmonger. I would like to believe that Blair’s public words were simply a cynical manipulation of the public to promote his reputation and were made in the certain knowledge that Clinton would not commit troops to a land war. Unfortunately I think that Blair was anything but cynical in his belligerence. The Observer reported on 18 July that Blair had agreed to send 50,000 British troops to take part in an invasion force of 170,000 if Milosevic had not conceded Kosovo to Nato. Incredible as this may seem, (and it was not denied by Downing Street) such recklessness fits in with Blair’s general behaviour. So there you have it, our prime minister would have committed the majority of Britain’s armed forces to a land war in which we have no national interest, regardless of the cost, deaths and injuries. The danger remains that Blair will find another adventure which does result in a land war. Over Kosovo, he behaved like a reckless adolescent and nearly came a fatal political cropper. Yet this government appears to have learnt nothing from the experience, vide the unpleasant and malicious fanaticism in Blair and Cook’s declarations of their intent to both unseat Milosevic from power and bring him before an international court, vide the humiliation of Russia, vide the ever more absurd declarations of internationalist intent since hostilities ceased. That adolescent idealists’ mindset could lead Britain down a very dark path indeed. It is also incompatible with a foreign policy that supposedly encourages elected governments (however imperfect they are) over dictatorships. What other lessons does this war teach us? It shows above all the utter powerlessness of the democratic process and the sham of international law. In the two countries which have taken the lead, US and Britain, parliamentary support was not formally sought nor given, funds voted or a declaration of war sanctioned. The other members of Nato have been impotent bystanders. The American Constitution was designed to prevent aggressive acts of war without congressional approval. That constitutional guarantee has been severely tested since 1945, but perhaps never so emphatically as in the past months. If an American president can commit such considerable forces to a war regardless of Congressional approval, it seriously brings into question the value of the constitutional restraint. Where exactly would the line be drawn in the Constitutional sand? In Britain, the matter was debated at the government’s convenience but at no one else’s. Incredibly, many will think, support for the war was never put to a vote in the Commons. As for international law, that has been shown in the most unambiguous manner to be a sham. The war was fought without a declaration of war, in contravention of the UN Charter and in a manner guaranteed to cause significant civilian casualties. Yet Judge Arbour at the War Crimes Tribunal does not indict the likes of Clinton and Blair, only Milosevic. (Readers might like to note that formal complaints to Judge Arbour about Blair and Clinton have been ignored). Law which is not equally applied is no law, but merely a tool of the powerful against the weak. Moreover, there does not appear to be any illegality at which the US would draw the line. Apart from incitements to murder Milosevic, there have been newspaper reports of attempts by the CIA to illegally enter Milosevic’s bank accounts and drain them of funds (we honest folks call that theft). If governments do not obey the core moral and legal commandments of their own societies, law does not effectively exist. If international law meant anything, the Nato action would be deemed objectively illegal. It was so first because of an absence of lawful international authority, there being no UN sanction for the War. On a national level, neither the British nor the American Parliaments sanctioned either the action or the expenditure which permitted the action. The war also drove a coach and horses through the UN Charter and the Nato Treaty. The UN Charter was breached because it prohibits action to amend a sovereign state’s borders. As for the NATO treaty, this only provides for action to be taken in defence of member countries. Clearly the Yugoslav government had offered no direct threat to NATO members because there was no attempt to act outside the territory of Yugoslavia. Moreover, the only NATO countries which might have called for assistance to a perceived threat – Greece and Hungary – did not do so and made it clear that they were far from supportive of the Nato action. In general terms, it was impossible before the war began to make a convincing case that Yugoslavia could present a threat to the peace of Europe. It is a country of ten million souls, poor with an underdeveloped industrial base. Moreover, its natural poverty had been greatly increased by years of civil war and UN sanctions. Balkan history tells a single story: any of its peoples which become possessed of the advantage of numbers, wealth or arms will oppress as a matter of course any other of its peoples. If the Albanians gain control of Kosovo, rest assured that they will behave as abominably towards the Serbs as the Serbs have behaved towards them. The disputed territory is Serb by history and Albanian by present settlement. There is no absolute right on either side. The reckless and even the enforced medication of the population grows apace. State bodies are pressing for widespread or universal medication. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends the universal use of statins by men over 50 and women over 60, ministers are considering making compulsory the addition of folic acid to flour and councils are being encouraged by Public Health England to put fluoride in the water supply. Antidepressants are being prescribed in record numbers and the side effects, which often make people feel as though they are going around in a mental fog, can make people feel the cure is worse than the disease. Moreover, they can be prescribed for people who either are not seriously depressed but suffering from a physical illness or people whose severe depression is the consequence of a physical illness. But even where there is no psychological problems or unpleasant but not immediately obvious damaging physical effects, drugs can have dramatic consequences. For example, aspirin is routinely prescribed to thin the blood, especially to those who have suffered heart attacks, but recent research found that aspirin’s daily use “ leads to 37 per cent increased risk of internal bleeding and 38 per cent increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke,” while the long term use of the contraceptive pill doubles the risk of glaucoma.. Probably the most controversial widely used medication in Britain at present are statins. Side effects can be extreme. Statins (which are used to reduce cholesterol) have been the subject of much complaint by patients. There are studies which claim that statins have little or no side effects, but the catalogue of complaints against them is so huge that it is difficult to see how they could have come to such conclusions. I have taken statins for many since suffering a heart attack, I can I can vouch for the fact that they have powerfully obnoxious side effects. Luckily I did not suffer psychotic episodes such as those which afflicted the unfortunate Dr Allan Woolley before his suicide, which was attributed to the side effects of statins. However, I have experienced severe disabling symptoms such as intense aching, especially in the hands, a permanent fatigue and a diminution of mental function, especially of memory and concentration (I had to consciously concentrate on what I was doing rather than simply doing it without thinking, while my power of immediate recall, previously very good, became unreliable. I only realised statins were responsible for such symptoms in 2007 – for years I attributed them to the process of ageing and the after effects of the heart attack – after I read several articles by Dr James Le Fanu who both questioned the general value of statins and described the side effects: ” Statins are useless for 95 per cent of those taking them, while exposing all to the hazard of serious side-effects and detailed the side effects….they seriously interfere with the functioning of the nerve cells, affecting mental function, and muscles.” (Sunday Telegraph 17 3 2007). He concluded that only those with a personal or family history of heart trouble should take them. There are also doubts about whether cholesterol levels have anything to do with heart attacks and strokes, so the concentration on bringing down cholesterol levels may be pointless. This suggests that medication of the elderly is at best ineffective in extending lives on average and may even be a cause of the stagnation of increases in life expectancy amongst the old. There is also a moral question, namely, how much medication should be given to a patient regardless of the quality of life they can experience? The idea that living is desirable regardless of the nature of the life is difficult to sustain morally. That is particularly true of the old. I have never encountered anyone over the age of 85 whose life I have known in some detail who has been averagely happy or physically comfortable. Almost invariably by that age the body has developed some serious malady whether physical or mental. That is not to say such elderly people generally want to die. Rather, it is simply that the life being led is normally miserable at worst and unfulfilling at best. If they are loaded down with medications, many or all of which will have obnoxious side effects, this may extend their lives by a few months or years, but the patient may well feel that there is a case for saying let nature take its course if those few extra months and years will be suffered rather than enjoyed because of the side effects of medication. Why do patients submit to drug regimes regardless of the ill consequences? Patients generally trust their doctors and are inclined to accept advice in the vast majority of cases. But even if they do not want to carry on with a drug because of the side effects – and many commonly prescribed drugs have effects which make the enjoyment of life seriously difficult – they find it difficult to refuse a doctor’s advice. Often it is not a simple matter of refusing a single treatment, because many patients, and especially elderly ones, will have a range of ailments and will fear that refusing to take one medication may ruin their relationship with their GP or a hospital consultant, with a consequent diminution in the quality and scope of their future medical care. Even if unfounded, such fears will drive patients to carry on with medication which is causing them serious discomfort. What can be done to reduce overmedication? First, if doctors explained the side effects to patients that in itself would probably reduce too ready prescription of medicines because the patient would be put off taking those with serious side effects simple by their recital by the doctor and doctors would be much less likely to prescribe such drugs unless they honestly believed a patient desperately needed them if they had to explain the side effects and overcome the resistance of patients who did not really need the medication. Second, non-medical directions and incentives to doctors to prescribe certain medications widely, whether that be government authored or supported schemes such as folic acid in bread or drug companies peddling medicines to doctors, especially GPs, which materially benefit doctors should be banned. Twenty six years lie between Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street (TWOWS) hitting cinema screens. Wall Street is fiction, although there are reputedly people in real life from whom the film’s main characters were developed, for example Sir Larry Wildman is supposedly drawn from on the British financier Sir James Goldsmith. The Wolf of Wall Street (TWOWS) is based upon the autobiography of a Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort. How much of that is fact is debatable, although the general tone of the man’s life given in the book is plausible. Both films begin their action in 1980s. Both deal with the shady world of finance. Both are vehicles for the unbridled egotism of their main characters. There the similarity between them ends. Wall Street is about corporate raiders, men who seek to take over companies and then asset strip them, sell them on quickly for a profit or run them as a business for a while, reduce costs (especially by cutting jobs ) and then sell them. The main criminality involved in the film is insider dealing. TWOWS is simply about making a fast buck and the faster the better, with not even a show of doing anything beyond making money. These people use any method from the huckster selling of penny shares to insider dealing and celebrate each success in the spirit of the man successfully running a hunt-the-lady scam in the street. They are the masters of the universe and those who lose out are suckers. There is zero concern for or even awareness of the greater general good of a society in the film. The protagonists in Wall Street are a young stock trader Bud Fox, and a corporate raider Gordon Gecko. Bud idolises Gecko and manages to work his way into Gecko’s circle by passing on privileged information to him, information which he has received from his father Carl who is a union leader at Bluestar Airlines. Once inside Gecko’s circle Bud sheds his morals and is content to help Gecko engage in insider trading until the point where he discovers that he is being used as a catspaw by Gecko, who is trying to take over Bluestar to dissolve the company in order to access cash in the company’s overfunded pension plan. Bud rediscovers his conscience after a fashion and outmanoeuvres Gecko by making an agreement with Wildman – whom previously he had helped Gecko to defraud through insider trading when Wildman wanted to take over a steel company – to buy a majority shareholding in the airline on the cheap and run it as a going concern. In doing this his motivation is more revenge for being betrayed than suddenly being disgusted with what he had become under Gecko’s influence. DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort is a trader who loses his job with a Wall Street broker when the firm crashes, moves into boiler-room trading in penny shares (which are barely regulated and allow for huge commissions to be charged to naïve investors who are often buying shares which are next to worthless). He makes a small fortune doing this. Belfort then decides to strike out on his own account in rather more up-market surroundings. With a friend, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), he sets up a suitably Ivy league sounding firm of brokers Stratton Oakmont. They operate on the principle of “pump and dump” (artificially inflating a company’s share price by tactics such as spreading false rumours or simply buying heavily and then selling the shares rapidly). Stratton Oakmont is given lift off by an article in Forbes magazine which calls Jordan a ‘twisted Robin Hood and the “Wolf of Wall Street”, which appellations prove a first rate recruiting sergeant for Stratton Oakmont with hundreds of young stock traders flocking to make money with him. From that point on he becomes seriously rich. What the films do admirably is show the difference between the cinematic portrayal of the American financial world in films released in 1987 and 2013. To refresh my memory I watched Wall Street again before writing this review. The striking thing about the film is how restrained it is compared with TWOWS. Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko is far more disciplined than DiCaprio’s Belfort. He has some semblance of intellectual and arguably even moral justification for what he does, most notably in a scene where he is addressing a shareholders’ meeting of a company he is trying to take over. This is where Gecko utters the most famous words in the film “Greed is good”. The words have serious context. Gecko is peddling the laissez faire line that competition is an unalloyed good because it is the agency which creates natural selection amongst companies and it is only that which keeps an economy healthy. He also puts his finger on a real cancer in big business: the development of the bureaucratic company where the company is run for the benefit of the senior management rather than the shareholders. Gecko rails against the huge number of senior managers on high salaries in the company he wishes to buy, a business which has done little for its shareholders. Whether you agree with the raw natural selection argument in business – and I do not – at the very least it shows that the likes of Gecko feel the need to justify what they do, to provide an ethical cloak for their misbehaviour. There is also a serious difference in the general behaviour of Gecko and Belfort. Gecko for all his faults is not a libertine. For him money is both an instrument and an end in itself. It gives him power and status, a medal of success in his eyes and the eyes of the world he inhabits. There is purpose in Gecko. He enjoys the material trappings of wealth but is not overwhelmed by them. In Belfort there is merely an ultimately empty grasping of licence with drugs, whores and absurd status symbols such as an outlandishly large yacht, which his ego drives him to wreck by ordering the ship’s captain to sail in weather which the captain tells him is unsafe to sail in. He acquires a trophy girlfriend, He dumps his wife. There is no solid foundation to any part of his life. The other big general difference between the films is ethical. Wall Street has a moral voice which acts as a foil to Gecko’s amorality. Bud Fox’s father Carl puts the case against capitalism red in tooth and claw. After Bud’s discovery of Gecko’s attempt to buy Bluestar Carl’s dissenting ideological voice is added to by Bud. In TWOWS there is no moral voice or pretence by Belfort (or any other character) that what they are doing has any social function or ethical content. Instead the public are simply viewed as a bovine herd to be milked as ruthlessly as possible. The fact that what is being done – whether it be selling penny stocks in a boiler room or using insider information in more sophisticated company – is no better than a confidence trick does not cause Belfort and his fellow participants the slightest discomfort only unalloyed joy. They are getting rich at the expense of suckers. It’s all a game whose only end is to make the individual rich and to be rich is a validation of their existence. Gecko and Belfort end up in prison, so in that respect at least they honour the old American film tradition of never showing the criminal getting away with it, although in the case of Belfort he ends up in a place which is not so much a prison as a country club. Both films are strong in all the technical ways – script, plot, characterisation and acting – that are used to judge films. Michael Douglas’ is a more studied performance than that of diCaprio who brings an amazing energy to the role. But arresting as Douglas’ performance is the film the film has ample space to fill out other characters. Indeed, in terms of screen time it is Bud who wins out. DiCaprio’s Belfort has strong claims to be the best performance in an already long career, but it utterly dominates the film and consequently the other characters have little room to develop than TWOWS. They either remain one rather dimensional or like Matthew McConaughey appear only in cameos. The quality of the films as films is reason enough to watch them, but their primary value, as a pair, is their charting, unwittingly, of the decline of moral sense between the 1980s and now. – Europe is a declining political and economic power. – The growth rate within first the EEC and then the EU has been poor overall compared with economies outside the EU. – The EU has undermined European economic performance through promoting too generous welfare states. – That much of the regulation comes not from the EU but national governments within the EU. – That the EU has smothered competition between nation states and this has hindered innovation and enterprise. – That Europe’s period of greatest world dominance was a time of intense competition between European powers. – That EU countries have suffered a loss of identity through mass immigration and those with empires had a further blow to their national self-confidence through their loss. – That European elites have had their energies eaten up with trying to create uniformity within the EU to the detriment of such things as investment and productivity. – That the Euro is the biggest economic disaster the EU has suffered, dwarfing the Common Agricultural Policy. – The EU as it is presently constituted is obsolete. Bootle laid down his terms for Britain remaining within the EU: an end to ever closer union, a guarantee of no second class status for the UK if she remains a member, a reduced EU budget, repatriation of powers to EU member states. National governments to be empowered to reject EU legislation and restrictions on the free movement of labour. These conditions are so improbable that it is reasonable to conclude that Bootle in reality wants Britain out of the EU. If Britain does leave the EU, Bootle is in favour of what he called the WTONLY option if a good free trade agreement with the EU cannot be arranged. The WTONLY option is to simply leave the EU and then rely on World Trade Organisation rules to give Britain access to EU markets. During questions it was heartening to see how many of the questioners were utterly hostile to the EU, despite the fact that many of those there came under the heading of the great and the good, the sort of people who would normally be considered unvarnished Europhiles. Most promisingly, voices were raised against the wholesale takeover by foreigners of British business and the ill effects of multinationals. I raised the question of how Britain should deal with the mechanics of leaving bearing in mind that the entire British political elite were Europhiles who would do everything to subvert the wishes of the British electorate by stitching Britain back into the EU through an agreement which included the four so-called EU freedoms, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour within the EU. I suggested to Bootle that Article 50 was a poisoned chalice which would enable British politicians to do just that. Rather surprisingly Bootle said that he did not think that the mechanics of leaving were important. I was not able to question him further because of the number of people wanting to ask questions. However, I have addressed the subject and others in the email I sent to Bootle after the meeting. If I receive a reply I will add it to this blog post. A few points I was unable to put to you at the Civitas meeting of 19 May. 1. How much do you think the status of the Euro as the second largest reserve currency has contributed to the survival of the Euro? I enclose a note on this at the bottom of the email. 2. You advocate giving both sides of the story, of admitting that leaving the EU will not be without costs both material and moral. The problem with that is twofold. a) political knowledge and understanding amongst the electorate as a whole is minute. Most will respond to the fear factor points not the reassuring points simply because they do not know enough to assess the situation rationally. b) all the STAY IN camp will be peddling is the fear factor. Hence, the electorate will be hearing the fear factor language from both YES and NO camps but only the reassuring points from those who wish Britain to leave. 3. How the UK leaves the EU is not a trivial matter as you suggested. The danger is that regardless of the wishes of the electorate, the British political elite will stitch us back firmly into the EU if they are given a free hand over the negotiation. This is so because we have a political class – especially the leading members of the class – which is overwhelmingly prepared to act as Quislings (Quislings in the service of the EU in particular and internationalism in general) to ensure that Britain does not escape the tentacles of the EU. Of course such a betrayal could apply regardless of whether article 50 is activated or a simple repeal made of the various Acts binding us into the EU, but Article 50 carries far more dangers for those who want us out of the EU than a simple repeal of the Acts would do. If Britain accepted the legality of Article 50 we would have to put up with any amount of prevarication and dirty tricks for two years. Worse, the time to reach any agreement between Britain and the EU under article 50 can be extended if both parties agree. As those negotiating on behalf of Britain would inevitably be politicians who have sold their souls to the “European Project”, the odds are that they would use any obstruction and delay by the EU to justify making an agreement which would practically speaking nullify the vote to leave. As sure as eggs are eggs, the agreement would place us firmly back into the EU’s clutches by signing Britain up to the four EU “freedoms” (freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labour) and all the rules regulating the single market. If the break with the EU is done simply by repealing the various Acts which bind us in, our politicians will not be able to use the restrictions and difficulties raised by Article 50 as an excuse for selling the voters down the river with an agreement such as I have described. Instead, they would have to take full responsibility for whatever they agree to. Article 50 is a particularly toxic poisoned chalice. Don’t drink from it. It is essential that before any referendum takes place that all mainstream UK parties make it clear that whatever agreement is reached by those negotiating on behalf of Britain this should only be ratified if the British people vote for it in a second referendum. Unless this happens the political class will give us something which binds us back into the EU. The reality of European history is that it has been primarily a history of war as far as you care to go back. War not peace has been the norm. The period of European ascendency was no exception to this and because of technological developments became more and more efficiently brutal. Use the European historical example and you are simply inviting the Europhiles to say “Told you so. Nation states can’t be trusted to behave”. What does the author say must happen before any referendum takes place regarding all mainstream UK parties?

question:What are things that you can help with when it comes to writing a novel, or any other piece of creative writing. Since you're new I'll give you some ideas on some of the things that you can help with and you can build on them. Some of the things I can think of right off the bat are: - Character Development - Dialogue assistance - Developing a plot - Providing alternatives endings - Brainstorming sessions (meaning I give you an idea and then we build on it together) - Description of settings - World building Can you think of anything else that you can do to help me and others with our writing projects?

question:Offer at least 10 additional things that would be helpful to include with your service and expand upon your prior response.

question:Offer at least 10 more things that would be helpful to include with your service and expand upon your prior response.