Cicero's Songs

The attacks against the innocent in Paris of course spur a deep compassion for those who have suffered and a righteous anger against those who planned this disgusting act of reckless violence. However, the inevitable call for immediate and violent retribution is giving me some pause. The fact is that with clear hindsight, the response to the attacks of September 11th 2001 was not necessarily the right one, in that the goal of eliminating terrorism was not in fact achieved, indeed the threat of terror has grown, even as the war on terror reaches new heights of violence. It is not that the West should do nothing in response to this outrage, but given the escalation of violence against ISIS is so predictable in the wake of these attacks, we should beware of being manipulated by the ruthless and reckless men behind this Islamic death cult. More to the point, there may be a yet greater conspiracy. There is a clear connection between the Chechens and the emergence of ISIS, and Chechens h...

OK, so Tony Blair was a steaming pile of hypocrisy in office. So he was also pretty incompetent, leaving us with a constitutional settlement that could destroy the country and economic policies that brought us to the brink of national insolvency.  OK, so he left us with the inept and unworthy Gordon Brown as his hand picked successor. So he created a coterie of dishonest unelected "special advisors" - the so-called " sofa cabinet " and undermined the civil service, personalizing his regime in a way that was also essentially against our constitution. So he was a war monger . So he was a brazen liar. So how come JP Morgan appear to have paid him a lot more than the declared £2 million ? Surely the experience he picked up in office belongs to the country, not to him, and he should, as his predecessors did, have used that experience to benefit this country, particularly since he did so much damage to it while in office. But, if the rumours speak true, perh...

OK, so Osama is now officially a stiff, although it turns out that his influence was waning anyway. It should not take away from the skills of the Americans who raided the Bin Laden compound and finally laid the ghost that has haunted the United States for over a decade. It should also not take away from the steely-eyed way that President Obama faced his country's national nightmare. One more thing we now know: it is probably a very bad idea to play the President at poker. Yet I can not be the only one who finds the descent of the media onto the smoking ruins in Abbottabad to be pretty disgusting. The place is now a sea of OB trucks, helicopters and well coiffured but mostly ignorant journalists glibly informing us that a few days ago something dramatic happened in the background behind them. The slightest detail is not too small to be turned into a story before said coiffured journo returns to his or her five star hotel in Islamabad and thence via a premium ticket to the first wo...

The death of Osama bin Laden, the leader of the fanatical death cult of Al Qaida, has sparked celebrations across the United States, and well it might. I do not usually feel elation at the death of a human being, but today is different. Sure Al Qaida continues in various guises in various places: a hydra headed conspiracy that only a couple of days ago sent a 12 year old boy to blow himself up. What did that kid need virgins for? He was one himself. I felt a powerful surge of loathing for the villains who put him up to such a crime and hoped that they would shortly face an unpleasant fate themselves. Ultimately it was Osama bin Laden who was the author of such wickedness. The charge sheet for such a monster is long indeed- and it does not stop with the murder of thousands of innocents on September 11th 2001. So although, of course, the war continues, and may even be redoubled; yet the death of bin Laden is of more than symbolic significance. Eventually the Al Qaida conspiracy will be o...

As the scale of the economic crisis for Britain sinks in, it is becoming ever clearer that there is no area of public or private expenditure that can escape scrutiny. No area, in fact, unless you are Harriet Harman where you instead try to create massive new costs by imposing a legal duty to implement the intellectually incoherent nonsense of Labour's Diversity Police. Meanwhile back on the real world, there is growing recognition that the Ministry of Defence has not escaped the decline into wasteful incoherence that has characterised the rest of government. The natural tendency of military bureaucrats to exceed even their civilian colleagues in the gold plating of projects has not been resisted by the incompetent Labour ministers, but now the time has come where some very painful decisions are going to be needed. British Military expenditure rose sharply as the country found itself brought into the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as the mission in Iraq has been di...

The latest release of public documents throws up the interesting story that Guy Mollet , the French Prime Minister of the time, suggested in 1956 that France and Britain form a Union . The idea of France joining the Commonwealth- then an organisation of far more substance than it has today- was taken seriously at the time in London. France under the Fourth Republic was yet to develop the robust nationalism that has been the hallmark of the Fifth Republic. It is interesting to speculate what kind of Europe we would see today, had France moved so decisively into the British camp, rather than, as it turned out, building the bridges to Germany that ultimately became the Franco-German motor. Arguably, a Franco-British deal would have simply reinforced the continuing bitterness against Germany, and perpetuated the divisions that caused the First and Second World Wars, Perhaps Germany would have quietly slipped into the Soviet orbit- a state of affairs that would have made a third world war ...