BATTLES LOST ON THE PLAYING FIELDS OF ETON

Although "the famous quote attributed to Wellington" - "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton" - "was probably apocryphal" according to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_in_popular_culture - David Cameron might like to reflect on whether his defeat in Europe yesterday was lost in the same place.

For our prime minister seems to lack a fundamental grasp of the history of the so-called European Project, which his predecessor Margaret Thatcher actually understood much better. As I pointed out in a post of last year - http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-iron-ladies-thatcher-and-merkel.html - whilst Mr Cameron "may privately regard himself as "the Heir to Blair", it is surely the German Chancellor who is heiress of the original "Iron Lady's" drive for democratic liberation of the former Communist Europe where Angela Merkel spent her earlier life..." 

Thus the most significant event in Europe yesterday was not the UK's failure to influence the appointment of the next President of the European Commission, but the signing of a trade agreement between the European Union, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28052645 Moreover, without wishing to appear politically incorrect or incite old enmities, the concept of so-called "Lebensraum" or "Living Space" - http://www.historytoday.com/martyn-housden/lebensraum-policy-or-rhetoric - has always been an important aspect of Greater European Politics, something Russian President Vladimir Putin knows only too well.

Yet the prime minister and his government seem to have no grasp of wider European geo-politics at all. The fact is that the EU can well afford to lose Britain in the long term because the Ukraine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine - as the largest country in Europe, and one of the few places in the world with surplus agricultural land resources, represents "Lebensraum". Although use of this expression  may be construed as anti-German, British colonial expansion was also strongly motivated by the political aim of increasing land and other natural resources available to a small nation state.

With this in mind, Mr Cameron might like to reflect on last week's figures from the Office of National Statistics which saw the UK population increase by the size of Scotland's, or about 5 million people, in the period between 2001-2013 - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2670751/Number-people-UK-smashes-64million-one-biggest-population-increases-Europe.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490 - together with a report by the University of Cambridge and the National Farmer's union which identifies a "significant" shortage of UK farmland by 2030: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28003435

When I attended a Welsh comprehensive school in the 1970s, both "Lebensraum" (which I studied for my history O level) and Malthus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus - whom I studied as part of my geography A level, were fairly key curriculum subjects. I do sometimes wonder what Mr Cameron and his friends learnt at school, apart from how to advance their own careers. However, this problem of the British elite is not new, as George Orwell, also an Eton school boy, wrote: "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

THE UK'S STATUS IN GLOBAL SPORT AND POLITICS

London Mayor Boris Johnson stuck on zip-wire before 2012 Olympics (Telegraph)

London Mayor Boris Johnson, writing in The Telegraph, bemoans England's exit from the Football World Cup and its associations - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/10918666/World-Cup-2014-Come-on-England-dont-force-us-to-reach-for-the-pzzzzzt.html - ".....As any anthropologist will tell you, sport is the imitation of war.....Success or failure in sport conditions national psychology, and football is the global game....There is abundant evidence that sporting victory leads to feelings of well-being and confidence – and confidence, as we all know, can be economically decisive.... 

......Germany seems likely to impose this Juncker geezer on the European commission, in defiance of British wishes. Wouldn’t it have been splendid to whack the ball in the back of Merkel’s net, and beat her team in the World Cup? And why should that seem so totally unthinkable? For the sake of our self-respect and psychological health, we need someone to get a grip on the England football team – and turn them round. Of course it can be done: look at what they did to get Team GB ready for the 2012 Olympics. We need an eight or 12-year plan to rescue our international footballing reputation...." 

What a difference two years can make! Britain was third in the Olympic 2012 medal tally, behind China and the United States, and, perhaps most importantly, ahead of German in fourth place. London Mayor Boris Johnson, despite his ill-fated zip-wire act, was riding high after overcoming the English Riots of 2011 when many countries questioned the suitability of Britain to host the Games in the following year. Yet these turned out to be a success, albeit rather an expensive one whose legacy, sporting and otherwise, has been rather more questionable.

There must also be questions about the political future of London's Mayor, who turned fifty last week. Could he be the figure to rescue Britain's diminished status on the international scene, and resuscitate the spirit of nationhood whatever the outcome of the Scottish Referendum later this year? Or do Boris and "The London Problem" themselves embody some of the very shortcomings of English football? By these, I mean key players whose loyalties lie beyond British shores, and others who are over-paid and under-performing.

Whatever the answer, the next two years are going to be interesting for this country. After the Scottish question, there is the prospect of a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in 2017.  If the UK votes to leave the EU, this could leave Scotland with the prospect of joining the Euro which might be a better scenario for that country. However, an England, Wales and North Ireland independent of Europe is an altogether less attractive proposition, unless one accepts a certain underlying logic that this territory is in reality already a colony of Boris's birthplace fifty years ago, North America.

IRAN WINS ENVIRONMENTAL GOAL AT WORLD CUP

Despite a 0-0 draw in its opening match against Nigeria, Iran has won an environmental goal at the Football World Cup by highlighting the challenge of wildlifee conservation through using the symbol of the threatened Persian cheetah on the team shirt and creating a "bio-ball" that is "painted with the design of 31 other countries' endangered species". Please see Iranian Environment Minister Massouhmeh Ebtekar's official "Persian Paradox" blog -  http://ebtekarm.blogspot.co.uk - which also provides an interesting account of both the legacy of the 1979 Revolution and "Prospects for Moderation" - http://ebtekarm.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/prospects-for-moderation.html

BETTER INFORMATION AND LESS PROPAGANDA

Map showing "the expanding battleground" of ISIL or ISIS (Financial Times)

Perhaps it is because the UK is a major centre of the global religion known as commercial sport, of which the ageing media cleric Rupert Murdoch is a high priest, and with many newly-constructed shrines in need of dedicated patrons and pilgrims, that the BBC's coverage of world news, along with that of other British "informational" institutions, has declined in recent years. The recent history of Iraq illustrates this problem very well, and many of us beyond London's political-media classes are now engaged in a continuous pilgrimage on the World Wide Web in search of reliable information sources. However, although Iraq is an extreme news problem, as I'm now going to show, it is not exceptional.

At the end of last month, the UK Royal United Services Association published a study -
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/british-wars-iraq-afghanistan-29bn-failure-131807825.html#u2PIG17 - reported in the International Business Times, whose story was syndicated by Yahoo, to the effect that: "Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost £29bn in government money and were strategic failures..... The 2003 invasion of Iraq fuelled the spread of radical Islam and terrorism in the UK and across the globe, according to the report by defence think-tank,  (RUSI)." In short, Iraq is bad news and this may account why the most recent outbreak of sectarianism has been poorly covered here.

I'm writing, of course, about the ISIL invasion of Iraq - http://www.ibtimes.com/it-isis-or-isil-jihadist-group-expanding-iraq-has-two-names-one-goal-1601346 - which is reported in another IBT - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Times -  article. This clearly explains the evolution of ISIL, or ISIS (an acronym used by the BBC): "The group changed its name in 2012 from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), from the Arabic term for Levant, al-Sham. That is sometimes translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It wanted to change its name to include a broader swathe of land, as its goal was to create an Islamic state based on Sharia, or Islamic law..." effectively from Iraq to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Wikipedia also has a comprehensive entry for ISIL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant - which maintains that the group "have captured and currently use American weapons, vehicles and uniforms in their operations..." or as one commentator to an Israeli news site's coverage of ISIL put it earlier this week: "....they're driving Toyotas"! However, to understand how ISIL functions and, more importantly, what is being done to stop its advance in Iraq, one really needs to look to a range of sources, including the BBC, as the following articles show: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27789770; https://uk.news.yahoo.com/iraq-kurds-seize-kirkuk-sunni-militants-surge-toward-093901288.html#AWqpBsf ; http://rt.com/usa/165612-us-iran-allies-iraq-insurgency/

The Russian news agency RT article from Friday 13th June entitled "US air strikes to support Iranian Revolutionary Guard's offensive in Iraq?" is perhaps the most interesting "spin" on just how far the politics of this region have changed in recent years. In answering the question, the article states: "If so, US may find itself assisting its archnemesis in the Middle East to fight against Sunni militias that enjoy support from one of America's closest allies in the region, Saudi Arabia. The ruling family of the kingdom has long been accused of supplying jihadists all over the region with arms and financial support, the New York Times reported".

Map from Wikipedia (included in RT article) showing "Islam by country"

Included in the RT article is the above map which shows "Islam by country". Iran's isolation as the major centre of Shia Islam is obvious. With the exception of parts of Iraq, Sunni Muslims dominate the remainder of the Islamic world. However, the importance of this narrative is usually over-looked in the British media and the regional significance of Iran misunderstood, something I commented upon in a post of 22 April: http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-history-of-very-iranian-revolution.html Such oversights may be partly the result of Arab and Israeli propaganda, with the latter sort promulgated today in The Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Israeli-ambassador-to-UN-Iran-is-the-worlds-primary-sponsor-of-terrorism-359366

All this illustrates the complexity of the situation in the Middle East, and not least the ambiguous role played by so-called Western allies like Saudi Arabia and, possibly "stakeholders" within other Gulf States such as  Kuwait (whose experience of invasion from Iraq may have been forgotten), in both sponsoring extreme Islamist groups whilst ostensibly helping to combat terrorism in the region. It also suggests that the vast amount of Western money and other resources pumped in to Iraq after the 2003 US-UK led invasion has itself fuelled regional instability. However, it may be that a more liberal Iran can now play a constructive role in helping to tackle this.

News coverage that recognises this complexity and reports all the facts as far as difficult circumstances allow is essential. Equally important, adequate news time needs to be allocated. Given BBC programmes and schedules that seem to be filled with increasing trivia this should not be difficult. However, given the deep-rooted problems which the Corporation seems to have in reporting news from beyond the Home Counties (ie problems of the Home rather than the World Service) - as reflected in this recent BBC debate on housing http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2014/06/20140609t1830vOT.aspx -  I will continue to multi-source both my international and national news feeds.

Postscript of 18 June 2014 - Since I wrote the above post, there's been a great improvement in the BBC's coverage of these issues and I very much hope this will extend to some other subjects.

LATEST UK REGIONS DISPOSABLE INCOME MAP

According to the Office for National Statistics figures released yesterday - http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/regional-accounts/regional-household-income/spring-2014/stb-regional-gdhi-2012.html -

•  GDHI (Gross Household Disposable Income) per head estimates give values for each person, not each household*
• In 2012 London had the highest GDHI per head, where the average person had £21,446 available to save or spend. Northern Ireland had the lowest, with the average person only having £13,902 (see Table 1).
• Of the 37 NUTS2 sub-regions, in 2012 Inner London had the highest GDHI per head, where the average person had £24,940 available to save or spend. The West Midlands sub-region had the lowest, with the average person only having £13,300 (see Table 2).
• Of the 139 NUTS3 local areas, in 2012 Inner London - West had the highest GDHI per head, where the average person had £36,963 available to save or spend. Nottingham had the lowest, with the average person only having £11,411 (see Table 3).
• Between 2011 and 2012, GDHI per head of population increased in all NUTS1 regions. The North East had the strongest growth at 4.0%, followed by Wales at 3.8%. Northern Ireland had the weakest growth at 2.7%

* Slightly confusing. A PDF of the full briefing is available at the above link.