We had no notice of 9/11 except in retrospect . As we were warned in advance maybe we should have assumed that the media antics of Pastor Terry Jones didn’t make for a gunshot in Sarajevo. In Jones we have a small man who rode the media machine until it scared him.

It certainly scared The President. POTUS wasn’t going to create a nasty precedent by picking the phone  to Jones. He gave that job to Secretary of State for Defense, Robert Gates.

However, even if Jones now quietly melts away we have an unpleasant reminder of just what can be achieved by one guy with a mission to be a famous global nutcase.

In 1914 it took an assassination. A hundred years later the threat of unleashing mayhem requires no guns, just TV and twitter. There’s a certainty that every society containing nuts. Now they have our attention. And the attention of competitive nuts on the other side too.

Looks like Robert Gates may be very busy.

Postscript from Twitter: Inspired By Florida Hate Pastor, Tennessee Minister Also Plans To Burn Qurans On 9/11 http://bit.ly/9l98Nk

Post Postscript from Twitter: seems like even the Florida burning is only on hold for now.

Bush tried, and he was more feared then Obama – and out of fear is born respect. I don’t care what peacenicks say, fear works – think of your own mother: I’m sure she only had to whack you a few times before a single icy stare was enough to keep you in line. In political strategy, we call this the “Muammar Gaddafi Phenomenon” – after the sweet boy (previously a holy terror until scared straight by the Iraq invasion) currently running Syria. Obama doesn’t give anyone incentive to smarten up. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would even let you break into his crib and guzzle all the beer from the fridge. “Hey man, make sure you recycle those cans, yo,” he’d admonish you from his couch.

I wish there was one world leader who would just call out this “peace process” nonsense already and say, “Look, we aren’t going to waste any more money and resources because this fighting will never end. So we’re going to concentrate on more promising endeavors — like colonizing Pluto, or maybe something even a bit less ambitious.”

Every attempt at peace in this region has failed. The Palestinians have violated every ceasefire because they just can’t help themselves from firing rockets into Israel. Israel has withdrawn boots from the ground in Palestine, and is only keeping a watchful eye on anything going in and out of the area because the Palestinians have proven themselves untrustworthy and have used the area as a staging ground for attacks into Israel. What war have the Arabs ever won for this land? They expect it to just be handed to them – even when they have every other country in the area aside from Israel in which to spread out.  You’ve got a “homeland”, you fools: the entire rest of the Arab world. At best, the world community has been saying for years that you need to share Gaza. Face it, you suck at sharing. And you really should have learned this when you were about two years old, but when people suck at sharing they lose the toy entirely – they don’t get to have it all to themselves.

One of the most clichéd arguments is that the only reason Israel keeps beating back the Arabs in Gaza is because they’re funded and supported by the USA. Well, they’ve earned it. The Israelis have mostly the same values as America and are a trustworthy ally in the region. And who doesn’t want to help their friends? The Palestinians, by contrast, are so unreliable and such unsavory characters that their own leadership – the President of the PLO – can’t even bring itself to trust its own parliamentary majority (otherwise known as the terrorist group, Hamas). When they aren’t busy firing rockets at Israel, they’re making cartoons for the young viewers of Hamas TV featuring a Jew-hating Mickey Mouse doppelganger. Which means that in the very best case scenario, even if Israeli and Palestinian leadership reach yet another deal, Palestine can’t ensure compliance by its own government.

There are two realistic options that no leader will address because they don’t exactly embrace diplomatic delusion.

Option One: Fund one of the sides of this war (the side with values most closely matching our own) until the enemy is completely wiped out and peace can then have a chance to blossom. A lot of sweating and grunting has to be exuded to reach a satisfying peace-gasm. You can’t just sit back and hope that guys with a penchant for biting are going to gently grace you with one.

Option Two: Accept that war is a natural state of affairs and that peace is an accidental, artificial construct not commonly found in evolutionary science. War isn’t pleasant, but neither is a shark mangling a sea lion. But we watch that play out on Animal Planet without getting too worked up about it. The only difference between them and us is that some of us are capable of rationalizing that humans are innately superior. The Israelis and Arabs are going to keep going at each other in a war of attrition, as has happened many times before in world history. We could let them have at it and stop worrying about it — and just be ready to get out the gun if the whole mess ever comes careening towards us, much like a hunter would do if a tiger and rhino were in a death lock a few feet away.

One of the reasons much of the Left (and Europe) favored Obama’s election is because his non-interventionist attitude was seen as the antithesis of George W. Bush’s.  Obama was going to butt out of everything outside of America’s borders and focus on wreaking havoc at home. Mission accomplished. All the European leftists with which I’ve spoken here in France are disappointed that Obama hasn’t given much attention to Europe, isn’t showing up at summits here, and didn’t attend the anniversary of the Berlin Wall collapse. My response: “You got what you voted for – a non-interventionist.” The response of one such leftist I debated on a TV program here was, “But he’s not doing the ‘GOOD’ kind of interventionism: the talking kind!” Point taken. The Left likes useless, unproductive, strictly symbolic intervention. In that case then, he will certainly be delivering on the revival of this Mideast peace charade. Good thing he already has the Nobel Peace Prize* to prove it.

*For attendance

… everyone thinks of New Labour as the ultimate public relations confection, a marketing machine with pagers, grids and spin doctors planning every event and speech to the last details.

Well, yes, Blair makes it clear that they did try to do that. But at the key moments he and many of his team would respond to events at a very emotional level. Reading this book (and Alastair Campbell’s Diaries) Government appears as a whirlwind of unexpected events and surprising upsets, blown faster by the storm-makers in parliament and the media.

He had great speech writers like Phil Collins and masterful advocates such as Alastair Campbell, but it was often Blair’s own personal feelings that produced a phrase or a stance in the heat of the moment.

Compare his track record on this with Gordon Brown and you can see the difference between a naturally Great Communicator and someone who simply did not enjoy public interaction.

Let me tell you a true Tony Blair story, never before revealed to an amazed world.

I have mentioned on my own website previously the strange Blair visit to Sarajevo in 1997 and the repulsive role played by his spin-doctors in packaging the visit so as to make sure he did not address a single word to the Bosnian public.

Basically, back in 1997 the manic No 10 spin machine suddenly decided that the PM might get a British media boost by being photographed next to a tank in Banja Luka with British troops.

We in the Embassy in Sarajevo heard about this and asked what the plans were to include a visit to Sarajevo, where the famous post-Dayton elections had just happened and the new three-man BH Presidency had been elected.

“None! Nothing in it for the PM!”

Whaaaaat?

Did No 10 not understand that it was in Tony Blair’s job description not only to use British troops as a photoshot prop but also to support their missions overseas and, forsooth, to understand what they were doing there?

Nope. Not interested.

So I fired off some telegrams to the FCO and No 10 remonstrating with this absurd idea, as did the senior UK commanders in Bosnia to the MOD. Eventually No 10 sulkily agreed to include a flying visit.

In Sarajevo Tony Blair (in the face of fevered No 10 pressure to keep the programme to the bare minimum) met the US general i/c NATO forces in Bosnia, and was given a quick tour of the local battlefields by General Cordy-Simpson.

I then escorted him down into Sarajevo. “God, Charles, how do you manage to live here?” he said in a genuinely sympathetic tone as we drove along the ridge overlooking the city and looked down on the bleak vista of shattered roofs and burned-out buildings.

We stopped as planned near one of the small down-town markets which during the war had been blown up by a mortar shell (said by most experts to have been fired by the Serbs). A crowd surged forward. Some old ladies in tears reached out to touch his sleeve, as if the PM were a Messiah.

I translated their entreaties as best I could: “Please, help us!”

Then we went off to meet the new three-man Presidency. A surreal encounter.

Tony Blair had nothing to say on the substance of Bosnian issues, but smiled benignly at Messrs Izetbegovic, Krajisnik and Zubak and urged them to ‘keep up the good work’ and other such platitudes. Krajisnik handed the PM some small token of respect from Republika Srpska which (intentionally or by a slip) the PM forgot to take with him when he left.

When the PM finished the meeting he had a quick photoshot at the front door and zoomed off to his aircraft, without saying a single public word to Bosnia. Weird, unprofessional, unhelpful to policy and insulting to Bosnia.

But that was New Labour and its top courtiers for you. From the start it was just all about them.

Anyway, my point in rummaging around in all this not especially interesting history is this.

On the ‘plane down from Banja Luka to Sarajevo, Tony Blair asked the small group of top officials in his cabin what had happened to his plan to push Michael Portillo for the High Representative job in Bosnia after Carl Bildt moved on.

Nervous coughs.

“Well, Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary did not quite agree…”

What had of course happened was that Tony Blair had (rightly) identified former Conservative politician Michael Portillo (famously ejected from Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1997) as an excellent candidate for that international job, and asked his team to push it.

But Robin Cook detested Portillo and so had contrived to shunt the scheme into touch. The genial but detached Spaniard Carlos Westendorp got the position instead.

A bemused Blair no doubt grasped what had happened. But did he care enough about Portillo or Bosnia or British interests or anything much to want to have a row with Cook about it when he got back home? No!

This episode made me realise that, when it all comes down to it, a Prime Minister is just another person sitting in an office, not knowing what if anything is happening in the office next door, let alone further down the corridor or out in the rest of Whitehall and indeed the country.

Orders are issued. Some have weight and get implemented. Others simply drift away.

It’s not always easy for a PM to know in advance which order will be in which category and so make a difference (or not). Or to find out afterwards.

All of which explains why ‘emotion’ has to be right at the heart of how top politicians operate.

What else is there to go on?

This seems like a logical time to pat ourselves on the back for gracing the world with our presence and to ponder how far we’ve come as a gender. But since the feminism industry does that for us every day, I figured it would be more constructive to analyze how much further we have to go.

So I hereby present — with full chromosomal immunity — a rundown of things women have being doing to totally screw themselves since winning the right to vote.

FEMINISM: We got the right to vote, and fought hard for it. But then instead of forging ahead in life and proving through action and accomplishment that it was well-earned, some women realized how they could make a full-time business out of simply being a fightin’ wommyn 4 life! It wouldn’t exactly be a productive industry, but The Man could foot the bill. Ever since, their motto has more or less been, “I’m a fightin’ wommyn and where’s The Man with the checkbook to pay me for telling him off?” You know who’s a better feminist than you? Marie Curie. She won two Nobel Prizes for science – all without the help of feminism because it hadn’t even been invented yet. And you have spent your entire life dedicated to figuring out how to parlay a hormonal discrepancy into a career on someone else’s dime.

DAYCARE: Look at us women, we can do it all! Except, apparently, raise our own kids. Instead they end up getting pawned off on babysitters and foreign nannies, and it only becomes a problem (maybe) when we note that their Spanish language skills far outdo their English. Look, just because you have a biological capability, it doesn’t mean you need to use it. And if you do indeed choose to, then take responsibility for raising decent human beings. Their future dating pool will thank you for it.

BABY VOICES: What’s the deal with women in their 30s and older speaking in childlike voices like their breasticles have yet to drop? Listen to any one of Dr. Laura’s radio shows for a taste of this epidemic. Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I didn’t talk like babies. I mean, I wasn’t personally around during their era, but I can’t imagine Joan of Arc having said, “Tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast,” as though she was Paris Hilton twisting her hair around her fingers while doing an interview with David Letterman. Society in general has become feminized since women won the right to vote: A surfeit of sensitive, effete men. Childlike women. And children whose maturity is stunted well into adulthood.

WOMEN WHO WANT TO BE MEN: The Left has the feminists, while the Right has far too many women who pretend to be overly interested in everything from fly fishing to NASCAR to hunting — constantly. Look, why don’t you laddies (intentional typo) just get a sex change already? I’m guessing some among us do this to seem more like one of the boys, and to put men at ease. But frankly, I don’t think anyone is at ease with that. It’s creepy. If feminists were rewired as right-wingers – to enjoy cliched right-wing activities — they’d be you.

MOMMY BLOGGERS: Being a woman with the ability to reproduce isn’t just a fact of life and incidental biological function, it’s these women’s entire life. All day, every day, “mommy bloggers” foist upon the world their trials and tribulations related to producing and raising offspring, as though it’s something so spectacular and such a unique experience that it must be shared with the world. Guess what? I went to the zoo recently and saw several pairs of animals – from ducks and geese to sea otters – who had more of a life than you ladies while still managing to raise a family. The argument to recognize women as productive members of society cannonballs right into the sewer when women opt to spend their day gazing at their navel and that of those of their children, and then broadcast the blow-by-blow on Twitter, FaceBook, or a blog as their only remotely productive daily activity.

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF : Susan B. Anthony is looking down and giving these gals the big thumbs up. Oh, for SURE! If there was any legitimate reason to fight for the right of women to be recognized as free-thinking, independent human beings, it was so they would then be free to seek out the most prominent and available male member of the Lucky Sperm Club. Then to suck him dry of one or more generations of treasure under the watchful eye of the nation via TV.

PLASTIC SURGERY: Ladies, is your love life better now that your breasts are bigger and faker? Did the fact that you’ve Botoxed your forehead into paralysis land you a raise, or more respect and admiration? Does Brigitte Bardot command any less respect as an outspoken animal rights advocate because she clearly has never been touched by a surgeon’s scalpel in a procedure that makes women look like the felines for which she advocates? And do you really think she’d garner any more respect if she did? So then why is cosmetic surgery more rampant than ever?

Rachel Marsden is an international political and communications strategist, commentator, TV and radio broadcaster and editorial writer living and working in Paris. For more information or to contact Rachel Marsden click here.

Yesterday the world awoke to two pieces of shattering news that have, in their own ways, fractured human belief.

According to Professor Stephen Hawking, it turns out that the Universe was not created by an omnipotent g*d after all. In his new book, The Grand Design, Hawking suggests that the meaning of it all is down to complicated, but basic, physics.

Ours is just one of many ‘multiverses’ that began “without any need for a benevolent Creator” who we otherwise believed made the Universe for our benefit.

Unlike Richard Dawkins, Hawking’s book is said to be more robust – and his credibility as an authority far more widely celebrated. For many, this makes The Grand Design a very serious assertion against traditional religious doctrines.

Next, and what may at first glance seem to be much more trivial, the British High Courts ruled that an ex SAS soldier called Ben Collins, had the right to publish his memoirs. And in doing so revealed the identity of BBC TV’s Top Gear, ‘Stig’).

The BBC argued that by unveiling the man inside the helmet, their TV series would lose a sense of mystery and intrigue enjoyed by old and young alike. This sense of the unknown makes the Stig concept a highly valuable brand in its own right. From a marketing business point of view, scores of variations of toys, books and games are now in jeopardy.

Childhood dreams of a mysterious Stig have finally succumbed to the fate of many others who went before the man in white: Santa Clause, Peter Pan, and the Tooth Fairy.

With everything from Creators, to Stigs, to love and hate, war and peace and genital dimensions of the rich and famous all neatly packaged, explained, many may be left wondering what the purpose and mystery of it all really is?

Back in the Millennium the Second Coming was predicted. But in keeping with dwindling numbers of regular churchgoers who would rather drink a pint of Guinness than a sip of communal wine, nobody of any special significance turned up. Even advertised prophesies of computer bugs turned out to be little more than incentives to buy new IT kit.

Doubtless, religious communities will put the news that no entity pulled the trigger for the Big Bang down to a yet another test of human faith. Boy racers will look at their options for joining the SAS. The BBC may take the opportunity to introduce a new Stig or even get their marketing people to launch a contest for ordinary people to fulfil their dreams and hopes by driving a sponsored car around a track.

Either way, the brand: belief, purpose, goal, vision, cause … will survive.

And maybe one day we will draw our last breath and open our eyes to the complete picture, as Hawking calls it, ‘The Grand Design’. We may finally realise that the greatest vision and mission makes trivialities such as business, marketing as much use as an Ark built to save the world but with a big hole in the hull. All designed by a paper- qualified dreamer with his mind on bigger things than building boring boats.

Jonathan Gabay

www.brandforensics.co.uk

If his own testimony can be believed – a big if – he commented himself that his nature hadn’t changed. No, it seems, alas, not.

People who talk baloney when they are not pure barking usually do so through one (or all) of three mechanisms: blame, projection and denial. All three activities poison the soul and potentially corrupt the listener, especially in Blair’s case as he is, undeniably, dangerously persuasive.

It was good to have one’s own prejudices reinforced. I have long maintained that the only thing worse than having Blair PM was having Brown. So after all the hoo-ha about Brown’s massive abilities we learn that Brown is to blame for the failure of New Labour, and in fact for the failure of so many of Blair’s policies.

What Andrew Marr – an extremely fine interviewer in general – failed to ask Blair at this critical point was: if Brown was to blame, then how come he endorsed his candidacy for the leadership when quite clearly since 2004 he had become a complete liability? How can anyone give unreserved support publicly to a future leader of the country knowing that they are not up to the job either in terms of the precious agenda Blair claims he was committed to, or in terms of their emotional stability? So we learn that Brown had no emotional intelligence. Right? OK! I see.

Thus we come to projection: the attributing to others the very defect we have, but never find, in our self. It would appear on the surface that Tony has masses of emotional intelligence; even Andrew Marr, mostly stony-faced, mostly concealing his massive contempt, allowed himself the occasional wry smile as the master went through the theatrics of appearing to respond, intelligently and emotionally, to the most probing of questions.

But as Marr was aware: this is the ‘Tony act’ or rather acting. We watch Olivier, we watch Gielgud, and we think that was a mighty fine performance, and so with Tony. He worked himself up a little about the unnecessary dead, but once you reached his core argument that under Saddam Hussein an equal number would probably have died, you realise you are into Stalin territory: one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic. So why not join John McCain and bomb Iran? The Holy Roman Empire opens up before us.

The worst problem of all with Blair, though, is undoubtedly the constant denial about any possible wrong-doing; the certainty that because he believes something then that justifies the course of action he embarks upon. Such a puerile belief about belief is hardly worth refuting. The idea that you could consider that you may be wrong seems by Blair to mean that we – the country and all his critics – should now seriously consider that they may be wrong. I cannot have done wrong, he says, because there must be two sides to this argument, and people who consider I have done wrong should now consider that other side! How tortuous is the denial – and how absent is the possibility that he feels what having done wrong, made a mistake, might ‘corporeally’ mean. After all, this kind of mistakes means people in large numbers, including your own countrymen, die.

Tony Blair is the tragic embodiment of the frustration of the hopes of this country. He came to office with a mandate to walk on water – he could have done or achieved almost anything: the people were all fully behind him. If only – if only – he had done something noteworthy, some good of which we could all be proud, something in the national interest. But no, it seems all we are left with are a series of book publications from dysfunctional Labour functionaries.

Let’s wait with quiet piety then for the Brown tome – it will be weighty.

Things have moved on in the home microscope world. Try the Apex Researcher microscope on special offer at Amazon, down from £350 to £199 for a limited time only!

Not only has the kit improved. Stuff you can peer at and examine in tiny detail has got better too. Thus now you can inspect something unavailable to those of us able to remember the long-lost days before 2004. Namely the nano-moral sensibility of the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson.

Here is Mr Thompson lecturing us at the Edinburgh International Television Festival:

As everyone knows, much of that investment derives from direct and indirect market intervention. Free-market purists claim that, if you took this intervention away or reduced it, the market would immediately come in to fill the gap. But look around the world. There are plenty of countries where public intervention is on the wane – licence fees cut, public broadcasters in decline – but in no country anywhere has the market stepped up to replace the lost programme investment.

Free-market purists. Hiss!

Mr Thompson is keen to sneer at the efficacy of free markets when it comes to providing supposedly good TV programmes. Maybe he has a point on that.

But he is less keen to criticise the role of the free market when it comes to setting BBC salaries. Such as his own measly £800,000 plus package, recently reduced when he gave up £163,000 of pension scheme money.

How dare we mere plebs who are compelled to pay for the BBC as a condition of using a TV set demand to see what the BBC pays its senior presenters and other ‘stars’!

Mr Thompson questioned the motives of those demanding that individual stars’ salaries should be revealed:

“I think there’s a lot of prurient interest in what presenters earn,” he said. “Is it right that the public should see how much goes to top talent? Absolutely. But is it in the public interest to know exactly what they earn? I don’t think it is … The danger is that if everything the BBC offers is made open, but not for other broadcasters such as Sky, you put the BBC at a disadvantage.”

Note the artful logic leap from ‘the public interest’ to ‘putting the BBC at a disadvantage’.

Just say we were starting from scratch and inventing a public service broadcasting system.

If (against all logic) it were to be funded by a poll tax thinly disguised as a mandatory TV licence fee system, what three obligations might we lay upon the people working within that new service?

First and foremost, that they act with a sense of the wider public interest at heart. That means operating to maximum transparency in all respects, including opening the books to normal National Audit procedures and answering to all Freedom of Information Act requests including on (indeed especially on) journalistic editorial policy.

Second, that they show modesty in their behaviour. This could mean, for example, that in return for their high-profile and glamorously influential media existences its publicly visible employees accept lower than normal remuneration rates and are not allowed to profit from their broadcast roles eg by writing books which in effect are advertised by the BBC.

It also might mean that serious attempts are made to save money when covering major international sporting events, and not piling in with expensive subsistence packages and unnecessary blanket coverage. Plus that ‘stars’ may be paid less than they otherwise might be (with levels of remuneration publicly available) as part of the core public service ethos. The Civil Service has to compete with the private sector for top people, yet it manages to publish salaries of individuals and spell out the contents of all public contracts via FOI. Why not the BBC too?

Third, that they accept a responsibility to maintain high standards across the board. Which means not crudely competing in a race to the immoral bottom to maintain ‘market share’, not mutilating the English language, and not allowing ego-crazed journalists to blur beyond recognition the lines between Fact, Analysis and Comment.

Instead we have allowed a sprawling, monstrous and arrogant caste of people to enrich themselves and erect barricades to normal transparency, all at the licence-payers’ expense. The BBC has deftly manoeuvred itself to be a machine for uncontrollable irresponsibility.

Licence payers such as yours truly can not examine BBC editorial policy. We are denied normal National Audit office standards of transparency. Journalists have lost balance and objectivity, as I have seen for myself in dealings with them at posts overseas down the years. Much of the output is tawdry self-indulgence which either could be offered by the evil free market or need not be offered at all. The BBC’s onslaught against our language continues apace. Above all, top salaries and gushing payments to ‘stars’ are a public scandal.

Yes. It’s tough identifying a principled way to run a politically independent public service broadcast organisation in our digital Tower of Babel age, and then indeed running it well and maintaining standards. Look at Poland where the political parties unashamedly squabble to get ‘their’ people on the governing boards and then in key TV jobs.

But we and the BBC can do better than the dismal situation we have now.

How about starting to get top BBC executives in effect elected by licence payers? Those who pay, get a say!

Each licence payer would get one vote (and in effect become a shareholder) at a BBC AGM. Large businesses do this without undue problems. No reason why the BBC should not do so too.

Mark Thompson fails to see that he has a profound credibility problem. Should we look long and hard at his sub-atomic moral sensibility?

Nope. Even through the world’s most powerful microscope one can’t see a big fat Nothing.

Charles Crawford, a former British Ambassador turned blogger and policy pundit, looks at how UK policies shape global events – and how global events shape UK policies. For more information, to contact or book Charles Crawford, click here.

Makes sense, right? Seems pretty innocuous? Wrong.

Apparently the state can never be too soft on immigration—making such common-sense statements way too harsh.

Canada has always welcomed refugees—which represent nearly 10% of total annual immigration.

It has rightfully done so on a case-by-case basis of merit, not as a crash landing by entire mobs hailing from known terrorist and criminal havens. Not to say that the people aboard this latest ship of mass refugees (with more likely on the way) are terrorists, but refugee status in Canada currently permits any of them to roam free within Canada while they’re being processed.

If ultimately denied, there’s little chance that the state will hunt them down and deport them, if past history is any indication. Because the end result is a massive unleashing of unknown entities into a population with only basic security checks at the outset, rather than an evaluation of the merits of any kind of persecution case, what we’re manifestly witnessing is an invasion of sorts.

One would think that the Conservative prime minister’s message balancing Canada’s humanitarian obligations with its responsibility to ensure security and safety would seem pretty straightforward. He’s acknowledged that the refugees are going to be processed, but that this concept of boatloads of people from part of the world where there has been a recent longstanding civil war smacks of an abuse of the system. Or at least deserves a good debate in parliament and legislative consideration.

Not surprisingly, the Liberal opposition still finds fault with Harper’s measured stance: “There’s a little bit too much on terrorism and human trafficking and not enough perhaps to indicate, I would say, a little bit of a level of compassion,” says one Liberal MP. “Just a sense of proportion on this whole thing would be nice.”

The government has already welcomed the ship of migrants ashore and is doing its best to process these people according to their humanitarian rights. It has given no indication that they’ll be prohibited from staying in the country. But when the obvious is merely pointed out in passing—the fact that they come from an area known for terrorist and criminal activity—the whole situation is suddenly seen as lacking in “proportion”?

Perhaps we can look to Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff for a take on how he’d handle the situation: “This boat was in the water for 90 days and … what was the government doing?

Now we’ve got a situation where they’ve docked and they have to have individual confirmation of each one of them.”

Ignatieff was then asked whether he’s was suggesting that the government should have turned the boat back before it got to shore. He responded that no, Canada isn’t Australia. Presumably he’s referring to Australia’s refusal to let boatloads of refugees land or to let any refugees freely roam the country until they’ve been fully processed, keeping them in detention areas where they are free to leave if they care to try elsewhere. Wow, sounds like a real human rights hell-hole.

Why aren’t boatloads of Australians headed for Canada?

Let’s say Harper had sent officials to board the ship and do some security checking on the passengers before they arrived ashore, if only to appease the Liberal opposition. And let’s say some of them failed the front-end security checks.

What would Ignatieff’s solution have been then? To toss them overboard? Make them swim back to Sri Lanka? Or wait until they arrived ashore in Canada before flying them right back home?

Does he have some magical means of avoiding this inevitable ugliness beyond ignoring it completely?

Let’s get real—and I speak as an immigrant to two different countries over the course of my lifetime (the USA and France): Anyone arriving in any country and wanting to settle and build a life there needs to understand that there’s going to be a certain amount of patience and hassle required. Paperwork, routine check-ins with authorities, medical tests.

And that’s in the best of cases. If you disembark, with no identification (or, worse, false identification) in a new country after a three-month sail on the high seas, I don’t think anyone in their right mind could possibly expect anything less than a major headache. If you’re a true refugee and escaping, say, death, then paperwork and processing shouldn’t really be that big of a deal. Only Liberals and assorted leftists seem to think otherwise, already in profuse apology mode over the inconvenience. In truth, we’re disturbing and inconveniencing the utopist liberal mindset more than the immigrants themselves.

What the Liberal opposition is essentially saying is that Harper should tone down the red-flagging rhetoric because it’s not very nice, and that he should have done SOMETHING before the ship arrived ashore—as long as that “something” didn’t involve turning the ship away.

This is a pure example of leftist rhetoric crashing hard up against the incompatible realities of the real world.

This is why the Canadian Liberal Party at the moment—and leftists in general—aren’t qualified to run Narnia.

Rachel Marsden is an international political and communications strategist, commentator, broadcaster and editorial writer living in Paris. For more information or to contact Rachel Marsden click here.

As a management consultant myself I should be saying, Good! But I am not. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, is staggered by the bill and wants to reduce it by at least 45% over the next four years.

I am reminded of the worst client I ever acquired some ten years or so ago. This was a huge family-owned food production company that had just been purchased by Venture capital; they asked me to go in to do some training work on developing middle managers’ capabilities. Sounds great! I wasn’t expecting the hero’s welcome awaiting me on my first visit in.

"We are so pleased to see you," they said.

I said, "Fantastic, but I don’t usually get such an enthusiastic initial welcome."

"You don’t understand," they said. "We’ve never had training before."

"Jeez!" I said.

And then one almost surreptitiously whispered, " Except of course when we do it in threes ".

" I’m sorry," I said, "I don’t follow you."

"Well, we’re not allowed to do training – or we weren’t until the buy-out. It was an offence punishable by instant dismissal. So we had to do it in threes."

I must have looked more bewildered still. "I don’t get it – if you weren’t allowed to do it, then why were you doing it and doing it in threes? What’s does doing it in threes mean?"

"We had to have training; we couldn’t function without it, but it was sack-able. So we had one person train another, and the third person had to keep a lookout down the corridor in case the MD was patrolling. That way we could stop in time and pretend we were doing something else."

"Bl—y heck," I said. The full horror of the regime dawning on me, and then the critical question: "But why? Why would any MD not want training for staff?" I guess I was innocent in those says!

"Because he reckons he pays us to do the job."

"Yea?"

"Well, if he recruits and pays us to do the job, why do we need training to do it? If we can’t do the job, then he wouldn’t employ us. If we can’t do the job we’re expected to leave or be sacked."

"I see," I said, incredulously.

And ain’t that it, bizarrely? Of course, this was an extreme situation. But let’s return to our London NHS. If the senior executives were being paid £50-60-70-80K pa to do their jobs, then buying in specialist expertise might seem warranted, but when you are on 3 or 4 or even 5 times these salaries, why do you need ‘experts’? Aren’t you being paid enough to be an ‘expert’ yourself? What are we paying these hospital chiefs for, exactly?

Further, the management consultants that I largely know – in small practices throughout the UK – add massive and measurable value. The kind of consultants used in these NHS contracts tend to be one of the big 20 conglomerates, and they all have a common practice: charging senior partner rates whilst installing junior-somethings-in-their-twenties-learning-on-the-job, whose particular aptitude is largely feeding back what the client – and the senior partner responsible – wants to hear.

So, as a management consultant myself I think I can agree with Andrew Lansley – cut by 45%? Go on, Andrew, make it 85%! Nobody will notice the difference – except the big 20. Expect a lot of new freelancers on the market very soon!

James Sale is the author of nearly fifty business books, a member of the Society of Authors, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the creator of Motivational Mapping. For more information or to contact James Sale, click here.

The story is not big in itself – but as the universe is holographic, we know that the smallest detail can reveal the biggest truths. We saw this in action during the General Election itself. Gordon using the word ‘bigoted’ wasn’t a big thing in itself, but it precisely revealed a contempt for ordinary people, even supporters, that everyone else had suspected or indeed known about for a long time.

So it is with this revelation. According to the report, Thames College in South London has been running a six week, Government funded, course called “Sexy Heels in the City”. Teenage girls are taught how to walk in high heels to enable them to prepare “for the business world and their social lives”. And one of its graduates, Celina Mystery, 16, says: “Since I started the course I’ve felt more confident .. I no longer feel pain”.

Which part of this do I need to run again to try to grasp? Sexy heels in the City – preparing for a business career? This, surely, explains why we have a £157b debt – nothing to do with the Banks, the financial crisis, borrowing – it’s simply the Labour Party advocating training for women which will enable them to participate in business via high heel shoes, poles or laps.

The word ‘education’ is derived from the Latin, educare – to lead. Where have we been led to?

It’s always painful to advocate making people redundant, but the sooner the cuts come and these ridiculous initiatives are gone, the better. And then all we have to ensure is that the silliest season doesn’t ever come round again.

James Sale is the author of nearly fifty business books, a member of the Society of Authors, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the creator of Motivational Mapping. For more information or to contact James Sale, click here.