The Green Ribbon

The Best of the Green Ribbon 2007

Before it's too late, here's a quick look back over some of the more notable posts from 2007:

January saw the Green Ribbon picking up on some 1970s state papers with a contemporary resonance for the debate about Scottish independence. Another official file from the period highlighted the significance of Scotland's Trident base for Ireland.

In February, the Government responded to the Downing Street petition against proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act with a robust defence of the planned legislation. Better news on this score would come after Gordon Brown arrived at No 10. That month also saw my still sadly unfinished series on US covert action in Britain, a subject I would return to later in the year.

In March, The Green Ribbon asked if the sell-off on the Shanghai stock market was a counter-intuitive sign of Asia's emerging financial strength. Gordon Brown's announcement of a tax review for Northern Ireland was also covered.

In April I was interviewed by Italian TV for a documentary about Aegis Defence Services. The English language version is available here.

An Afghan back-channel?

It would be premature to draw any conclusions about today's threatened expulsion of a British and an Irish diplomat from Afghanistan, and the Telegraph's claims that MI6 have been negotiating with the Taliban.

The latter story is, however, plausible. MI6 have a long history of involvement in back-channel negotiations, which has often caused friction with more hawkish (or less subtle) elements in the secret state.

The value of such contacts was the subject of an intriguing debate in the pages of Prospect magazine last year. Arguing in favour was Alistair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, a former MI6 officer who served in Afghanistan and later became an EU advisor in the Middle East. Arguing against was Dean Godson of Policy Exchange, a former Telegraph leader writer and leading neoconservative advocate of 'political warfare'.

I wonder whether a similar realist/neoconservative faultline doesn't underlie the Telegraph's story.

High stakes in the defence debate

The Mirror's new political correspondent James Lyons has an important story about the defence chiefs' attack on Gordon Brown last month:

Three retired generals who attacked Gordon Brown for not spending enough on our troops have lucrative jobs with defence firms, the Mirror can reveal.

The Prime Minister was accused last month by five former military chiefs of short-changing soldiers.

But Admiral Lord Boyce, Field Marshal Lord Inge and General Lord Guthrie did not bother mentioning that their firms had made fortunes from huge military contracts and the war in Iraq.

Yesterday Labour MP Eric Joyce called for a probe into why they ignored parliamentary rules. He said: "They should say sorry to their fellow Lords and come clean about how much they are pocketing from these defence firms." (Mirror)

A very good reason to get on and abolish the House of Lords.

OurKingdom on e-borders

Trevor Smith, the Lib Dem Northern Ireland spokeman in the Lords, picks up on some of the flaws in the Government's e-borders plans at OurKingdom:

If the e-borders are drawn around the UK to include Northern Ireland, that will be welcomed by political Unionism, if less so by Northern Irish business. Equally, if they are drawn round Great Britain, excluding Northern Ireland, that would be more acceptable to Irish nationalist sentiment but risks alienating the Unionists; a classic illustration of the zero-sum nature of politics in Northern Ireland.

Stormont tax review foreshadows Scottish Debate

Sir David Varney published his long-awaited review of tax policy in Northern Ireland this week. As most observers expected, Varney rejected the case for a corporation tax cut to match levels in the Republic.

What was more surprising was that that was all he did. His original remit was to consider ‘how current and future tax policy, including the tax changes announced in the Budget 2007, can support the sustainable growth of businesses and long-term investment in Northern Ireland.’

In the event, he concentrated almost exclusively on refuting the case for a corporation tax cut put forward by the Economic Research Institute of Northern Ireland

From my latest post over at OurKingdom.

Labour and the Generals 1974-2007

Interesting thread over at the Cedar Lounge Revolution, that has some important contemporary resonances:

Perhaps the most interesting new myth, or narrative, of the Peace Process is the one which goes as follows: In 1973/4 everything that was in the Good Friday Agreement was available - this was the great lost opportunity for Northern Ireland.

The Sunningdale Conference is seen as the high water mark of potential before the sustained spiral into violence. Sometimes the ‘blame’ for this is landed at PIRA’s door, other times at Ulster Unionism. This myth links into, but is not identical, to another myth which argues that everything in the Good Friday Agreement was also available in Sunningdale. (New Myths of the Peace Process No 1)

I tend to agree with WorldbyStorm that the failure of Sunningdale was overdetermined given that if faced opposition from republicans as well as from the unionist Ulster Workers' Council, whose general strike ultimately brought down the power-sharing Government.

Another key factor was that the British Army was at best reluctant to confront UDA and UVF intimidation, or to get involved in maintaining public services. This wasn't helped by the poisonous relationship between the military and the Labour Government of the day, which led the Prime Minister himself to fear a coup.

Varney contradicts Alexander on corporation tax

When Labour's Holyrood leader Wendy Alexander announced her devolution proposals last month, she cast some doubt over whether the Scottish Parliament could legally be given control of corporation tax:

We should approach this with an open mind but there are constraints here.   Some suggest VAT for example but EU rules appear to preclude VAT variation within a state.   So it could not be a candidate for devolution, although could be considered for partial assignation. Likewise the issue of Corporation tax variation within a state also raises issues of compliance with EU rules (the Azores judgement) as well as potentially distorted transfer pricing. (Scottish Labour)

In his review of taxation in Northern Ireland, Sir David Varney seems to have clarified the Azores issue:

A move to a differential corporation tax rate for Northern Ireland would be possible in principle. However, it would involve legislative changes and legal issues would affect the design of such a scheme. Also, the fiscal consequences of such a move would have to be borne immediately by the Northern Ireland Assembly. (Varney Review)

Varney review of NI taxation published

The Treasury has today published Sir David Varney's review of the tax regime in Northern Ireland.

  The Executive, at its last meeting before Christmas tomorrow, will assess   the impact of the study which was expected to reject a special cut in the   rate for a region of the United Kingdom.

  And a renewed demand for another face-to-face meeting between First Minister Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness with Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be on the cards.

  While widely anticipated, the refusal to accept a lower official Corporation Tax level for the province - a campaign supported by the Belfast Telegraph and small businesses lobby as well as politicians - is a blow to the devolved administration. (Belfast Telegraph)

No doubt that this should be seen in the context of forthcoming debates about more powers for the Scottish Parliament.

The Charles Moore school of editorial judgement

Policy Exchange chairman Charles Moore has been hitting back at Newsnight over its critique of the evidence behind the think tank's report, The Hijacking of British Islam.

Policy Exchange had offered them many of the receipts it had collected from mosques as evidence of purchase; now they said that they had shown the receipts to mosques and that there were doubts about the authenticity of one or two of them.

Given that the report was being published that night, the obvious thing for Newsnight to do was to broadcast Policy Exchange's findings at once, allowing the mosques to have their say about the receipts.

There was no need for Newsnight to claim "ownership" of the report. Instead, the editor, Peter Barron, decided to run nothing. His decision meant the Policy Exchange report was not touched by the BBC at all. (Daily Telegraph)

The approach Moore advocates would have been highly questionable. One of any editor's basic functions is to ensure their output is not libellous. There is a notable precedent to suggest that disclaiming "ownership" of the report would not have achieved that.

Intelligence, deception and the roots of neoconservatism

Col Pat Lang's blog has a very timely piece by David Habbakuk looking at the intelligence roots of the neoconservative movement. The comments thread is also worth a look.

A good example of familiar neocon approaches was the hatchet job done on Sherman Kent, a pivotal figure in the wartime R&A branch of the wartime OSS and in shaping the analytical side of the CIA, by Carl Schmitt and Abram Shulsky -- the latter of whom headed the Office of Special Plans, through which much of the bogus intelligence used to justify the Iraq War was channelled. Their article Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence suggested that Kent's conception of intelligence as research involved a naïve faith in the ability of a 'social science' method to generate reliable predictions about the behaviour of adversaries. (Sic Semper Tyrannis)

During the 1990s, Shulsky and Schmitt were senior associates at the National Strategy Information Center, the US think tank whose President is Dean Godson's older brother, Roy.