Some figures about foreign aid

These are not really the figures we want as they give no detail but, I think, we can assume that every penny is either mis-spent, embezzled or has gone towards keeping bloodthirsty kleptocrats in power.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon asked HMG:

what is their most recent forecast in cash terms of United Kingdom expenditure on foreign aid, including that part of it administered by the European Union, for the period 2010 to 2015.

Baroness Northover (more here) on behalf of HMG replied:

Total UK ODA spend, including the share of the UK's contribution to the European Commission which has been classed as ODA eligible, for 2010 and 2011 is provided below:

2010:£8,677 million (gross)- £8,452 million (net); and 2011: £8,841 million (gross)- £8,629 million (net).

Please note that the net figures represent expenditure net of loan capital (i.e. principal) repayments.

That's a lot of taxpayers' money to be mis-spent, embezzled and generally wasted on those kleptocrats.

The Reichstag fire

History Today reminds us that today is the anniversary of the Reichstag fire: February 27, 1933. For some reason the video starts with a note in Hungarian. It says:

The Destruction of the Reichstag

The seat of the German national assembly and one of Berlin's most beautiful Italianate renaissance palaces has become the victim of Communist arson. 

The blog continues:

Coming less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, the attack was used as evidence of a growing Communist plot against the German government. van der Lubbe was tried, found guilty and executed the next year. Several other Communist leaders were also tried, and acquitted. But the fire was the precursor to a total seizure of power by the Nazis, who began to systematically dismantle Germany's democratic institutions and victimise their political opponents. The real identity of those responsible for the fire remains topic of much discussion amongst historians.

It's an odd way of putting it, the implication being that van der Lubbe was a Communist leader as well, which he most definitely was not. But it definitely was used by Hitler to seize total control and to suppress the Communist party (not that it had put up much of a fight).

It was also used by the Communists to promote their own propaganda, a far more successful enterprise in the end. As I wrote in a long piece a while ago, entitled The big lie or many small lies:

Here is an interesting question for all our readers? Who burnt down the Reichstag in 1933? Can you recall the name of Marinus van der Lubbe, the somewhat crazed Dutchman, who actually set it on fire? And even if you can, do you not think that there was somebody behind it all? After all, it could not be just a lone lunatic?

It would be interesting to know how many of those who read the above paragraph nodded and said: “Of course, Hitler ordered and manipulated van der Lubbe (assuming you can recall the name) and then used the fire to get rid of the opposition and to blame the Communists.”

I am willing to bet that nobody said: “Oh yes, it was the Communists and they managed to get away with it because Dimitrov’s trial (assuming you can recall that name) was unsuccessful. Hitler merely took advantage of the event.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between good and bad propaganda.

I am rather proud of that piece and, quite shamelessly, recommend that people read it.

It seems that ...

... Dr Rachel Frosh who dared to re-tweet something that is absolutely true but upset the socialists has been reinstated on the candidates' list. One wonders what she had to promise. Never to say anything nasty about socialists again?

Playing with the big boys

The Eastleigh by-election has proved to be even more boring than the usual run of such events. None of the candidates are of the slightest interest and the rather squalid scandals that surround some of the parties remain of little real interest to anyone except election geeks.

There is a whisper going round that UKIP might do very well, indeed, and a "surge" is being reported on the doorstep. Of course, a surge on the doorstep is not necessarily a surge in the polling booths, which is the only opinion poll that matters in real life. Still, after twenty years in existence, with a great deal of media coverage (of the Dear Leader if not necessarily the party) and a propitious political situation, it would be pleasant to see some kind of an electoral result on UKIP's part.

As I have pointed out before, the Labour Party at this stage of its growth was four years away from its first government (albeit a short-term minority one).

In the meantime, some of the UKIP boys (no girls so far) have decided to play with the big ones and to set up their own site to rival ConHome and Labour List, called The Ukipian. I have a feeling that there have been such blogs in the past but this is the one that is set, according to the two founders, to do well and to grow and grow.

There is an article in The Commentator that introduces the site and explains the need for it:

This Thursday, UKIP looks set to achieve its best ever result in a Westminster election. Yesterday, Channel 4 News’ Michael Crick tweeted that he thought the party could “pull off a surprise victory in Eastleigh”, and with the polls standing as they are, there’s every chance that he could be right.

In the last 12 months, we’ve witnessed the Party rise to the very forefront of the British political scene and in turn UKIP has gained a significant increase in press coverage. This is largely testament to the unwavering dedication of Nigel Farage, Paul Nuttall, and other party officials getting out there and spreading UKIP’s common sense policies on a new and unprecedented scale.

UKIP will celebrate its twentieth birthday this year and naturally suffers the occasional growing pains felt by all that go through the process of developing into maturity. Criticism of UKIP has often been prejudiced and unfair but occasionally right in highlighting some of the challenges that the party has yet to overcome. As UKIP continues to professionalise and develop into a mature political force, it’s crucial that the voices of its members and activists remain heard. Although the party is young, the vast wealth of experience and wisdom found within its ranks is spread generously throughout its membership.

As an unofficial collaborative blog run by UKIP members, The Ukipian aims to provide a platform for those within the party who won’t necessarily ever get the opportunity to appear on Question Time or the Andrew Marr Show, but whose views and ideas are as intriguing, valid and relevant as any other within the party.

Some of that is true and some not so much and a good deal the usual political guff. Naturally, there is praise being heaped on the Dear Leader and his henchmen. On another thread I pointed out that they cannot really be taken seriously as a rival to the other blogs until we see some criticism of the Dear Leader to which one of the founders solemnly replied:

Unlike the Tory Party, UKIP is currently led by a Leader delivering record poll ratings and election results. That's hard to criticise.

My question as to the election results and what they have actually won so far has elicited no reply so far.

Let us have a look at The Ukipian. A suggestion that Lord Ashcroft should drop metro Dave for conservative Farage, an article that promotes grammar schools (a nice idea but probably out of date), Margot Parker (not totally sexist after all) on needing to protect British jobs, several "reports" from Eastleigh that can be disregarded until the results come through tomorrow, Tim Akers banging the anti-Bulgarian and anti-Romanian drum, and so on.

Should they not do as well in Eastleigh as they expect, will there be any criticism of policy, strategy or of the Dear Leader? We shall see.

Comedian does well in Italy

No, not Berlusconi, whose party did not do as well as they had expected, but the real comedian, Beppo Grillo, whose party, " the Five-Star Movement emerged as the largest single party in the lower house, with over 25% of support, and the second-largest party in the Senate, where he won 23.8% of votes". This comes from the analysis by Open Europe, who lament the fact that the results of the election are likely to cause yet more turmoil in the eurozone. They also suggest various scenarios as to where Italian politics and politicians might go next but, I think, we can assume that they will find yet another way forward or sideways.

Most Italians, according to all analysts, remain pro-EU and even those who voted for the Five-Star Movement are unlikely to want to exit even from the euro. At the same time 57 per cent voted against austerity measures, which they perceived as German-inspired and orchestrated. No doubt, there were references to the evil war criminals just as there always are in Greece.

So, an election once there is a new President, whose term is to expire in May and who, therefore, cannot dissolve parliament in the forthcoming months or, perhaps, a coalition between two or more comedians?

Italian election

1.30 am According to the Financial Times, Italy is in for a troubled period and probably a second election very soon.

Italy was on Monday night staring at a period of prolonged political instability following a general election in which voters delivered a resounding rebuff to austerity policies with little hope of any party mustering a governing majority.

The upstart anti-establishment Five Star Movement, founded only three years ago by the comedian-blogger Beppe Grillo, was on course to stage the biggest shock by garnering the largest number of votes of any single party. With all but 2 per cent of polling stations reporting, the grassroots movement was leading on 25.5 per cent, a few thousand votes ahead of the centre-left Democrat party.

But the nation was torn three ways between Mr Grillo and his band of political novices, Pier Luigi Bersani’s centre-left coalition and Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right alliance, raising the prospect of a second election within months.

None of this would matter if whoever gets elected would not be part of our real government as well.

Going on as we speak or as I write this. The Grauniad is updating, should anyone be interested enough to care. Looks like Berlusconi might be back. Personally, I would prefer a real comedian like Grillo.

UPDATE: Der Spiegel thinks that the Centre Left under Pier Luigi Bersani may have won a majority in the Lower House but not in the Senate. A gridlock, in other words, like most streets in Rome.

Let us look back

As we approach March 5, the presumed anniversary of Stalin's death (it was announced on that day but that means little) it may be a good idea to look at an event that took place on this day three years after the old tyrant's demise: Nikita Khrushchev's speech at a secret session of the Twentieth Congress.

I wrote about it on the fiftieth anniversary, referring to the people who still wished it would go away and we would be back to February 24, 1956. No such luck.

Fifty years ago, on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, mounted the podium to give his report on the final, closed session of the party’s Twentieth Congress. It was, to put it mildly, an unusual report.

Instead of the expected boasts and admissions of failure (to be blamed on someone else) Khrushchev delivered a four-hour long speech in which he denounced what he first referred to as the cult of personality that had grown up around Stalin. In effect, he denounced Stalin and some of his crimes.

The speech concentrated on the purge of the party and the destruction of the Communist cadres through “glaring violations of revolutionary legality”. Little was said about the many millions of other victims but there were references to the destruction of the agriculture (and by inference, of the peasantry), to Stalin’s grave mistakes in the Second World War (the full horror of that is still largely unknown in Russia), the deportation of whole nationalities at the end of the war and the paranoia of the doctors’ plot.

Like a good Soviet apparatchik, Khrushchev made no references to the largely anti-Semitic nature of the second purge, which was gathering momentum as Stalin fortuitously (or, perhaps, not) died. But he did quote Stalin’s instructions on how to extract confessions from the various highly placed medical specialists and their assistants, all of whom had been arrested: “Beat, beat, beat and beat again”. Few survived.

It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall. Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)

The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.

There is more in that piece about what Nikita Sergeyevich did not say (though he went back to the subject in another speech, this time open and more detailed, at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961, which really did unleash discussions of the subject. In my very ordinary school in Budapest, the weekly form-teachers' lessons were set aside for the discussion of the speech and what it meant for the concept of Communism. We were in our early teens. It can be imagined how much more was said among our elders if not betters. How different from 1956 when the secret speech had to be smuggled in to meetings of such groups as the Petöfi Circle. 

I wrote about it again when the death of Viktor Grayevsky, the man who passed the speech over to the Israelis who disseminated it in the West, was announced. 

We know how little is said or written about the horrors of Communism, which is seen as being somehow better and nicer in intention than the other monstrous ideology of the twentieth century, Nazism. Just imagine how people felt when the truth began to be spoken in the country where the system was created and first tried out.