F riends with military experience ponder two questions about the Iranian
kidnap of the 15 British sailors. The first is, ‘Why didn’t they put up a fight?’ The answer seems to lie with the rules of engagement. This was effectively confirmed by Sir Alan West, until recently the First Sea Lord, who said that the rules were ‘de-escalatory’, and part of the British attempt to be a ‘force for good’ (the government’s cant phrase about our armed services). ‘Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back and that, of course, is why our chaps were ... captured,’ Sir Alan explained, apparently with approval. So enemies who know that we have these rules, and are themselves absolutely happy to be a force for bad, can attack almost with impunity. Is it surprising that the services experience difficulty recruiting people? The second question is, ‘Have the sailors had proper Conduct after Capture training, especially the more advanced course called Resistance to Interrogation?’ The damaging things that the captured servicemen said on Iranian television appeared to go right against the rules about what can and cannot be said, and most did not appear to contain the coded signals to indicate duress in which the sailors should have been trained. One of the most powerful weapons of torture which does not inflict actual violence is sleep-deprivation. I gather that, because of human-rights considerations, this can no longer be applied in our training to resist interrogation, so our service personnel are more vulnerable to the real thing. The Iranians are doing brilliantly, and we are helping them.
By the way, I know that he declares his interest, but isn’t it rather annoying to find Norman Lamont making speeches in the House of Lords and elsewhere about how Iran is a much-misunderstood country? Lord Lamont is the Chairman of the Anglo-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, and has business interests there.
How sharply the conduct of the sailors though the fault may well not be theirs — contrasts with that of the Marines captured in the invasion of the Falklands 25 years ago. Each generation since the second world war has had a formative experience of a British military adventure. Suez taught the first the end of our imperial role. When the Falklands crisis began, I was a 25-year-old leader writer on the Daily Telegraph. Nothing was more striking in our debates in the office than the generational difference. Almost everyone who could remember Suez assumed that we would be defeated if we tried to retake the Falklands, and that we should therefore not try. We who were too young to remember assumed the opposite: of course we should recapture the Falklands and of course (not that we knew what we were talking about) we could. We wrote a song, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’, calling for the resignation of Lord Carrington and hymning the virtues of the Falklands sheep (‘For ’neath their dirty fleeces hide,/ Hearts that swell with loyal pride’). The confidence that victory in the South Atlantic restored allowed many other battles — above all, the miners’ strike — to be fought. Now a new generation contemplates the latest adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan which, unlike Suez and the Falklands, are longdrawn-out. Neither the collapse of British power, nor its triumph, but something more confusing, and still unresolved.
Another change since the Falklands is the growth of the idea that the British media are being unprofessional if we display any preference for our own country’s cause over that of its enemies. Except in the BBC, media attitudes at the time of the Falklands were different. A friend who fought on Mount Tumbledown remembers what happened when shooting started and some British soldiers were hit. The late A.J. McElroy of the Daily Telegraph and Tony Snow of the Sun laid down the manual typewriters with which they had yomped to the battlefield, and picked up a stretcher. I can’t help thinking that this was the right thing to do.
It was Labour’s own Freedom of Information Act which was used to smoke out some of the documents about Gordon Brown’s disastrous decision in 1997 to abolish the tax relief for pension funds. But what tends to be overlooked is that New Labour’s entire method of government is designed to get round the openness which it extols (just as its fundraising methods circumvent its attacks on ‘sleaze’). Part of the reason for this is the ‘Project’s’ distrust of civil servants; part is the fear of leaks, and part is the fear of Freedom of Information. FOI makes it more important than in the past not to record your real debates. So if you have FOI, you also, inevitably, get ‘sofa government’. I pity any future historian trying to find accurate and full documentation of the last ten years of British government. For the first time for more than a century, it does not exist.
Someone showed me a single clause in a contract relating to his employment the other day. It refers to section 77 (4A) of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Equal Pay Act of 1970, section 72(4A) of the Race Relations Act 1976, section 288(2B) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, para. 2 of schedule 3A of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, section 203(3) of the Employment Rights Act 1996, regulation 35(3) of the Working Time Regulations 1998, section 49(A) of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, regulation 41(4) of the Transnational Information and Consultation Regulations 1999, regulation 9 of the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000, regulation 10 of the Fixedterm Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002, para. 2(2) of schedule 4 of the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003, para. 2(2) of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, regulation 40(4) of the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004, para. 12 of the Occupational and Personal Pensions Schemes (Consultation by Employers and Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2006 and para. 2(2) of schedule 5 of the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006.
About every seven years, I buy an identical pair of jeans. Last week, I shopped for the latest pair and found that the 34in waist I had worn before was now too big for me. Independent evidence (a tape measure) shows that I have not got thinner. So I conclude that the manufacturers now lie in their labelling. I don’t suppose there will be many complaints to Trading Standards officers.
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