This could become fascinating. The RoI sounds like it will expect the UK to behave (ie have Ireland's migrants returned to UK) exactly as France does not behave in relation to to UK.
The ramifications - EU relations, GFA, Brexit deal, CTA, open border etc - are substantial.
It’s gestural from Ireland. There’s no way they can return migrants from the EU to the UK without the EU reciprocating - allowing the UK to return the boat people to France. Not going to happen
If a coach travels from Dublin to Glasgow via Belfast, at what point do UK Border Force check whether the people on board have visas or passports?
When they arrive at Glasgow, I believe.
You don't need a passport to get from Ireland to the UK. I regularly travel back and forth by car ferry and I've never once been asked for my passport, or indeed for any identification. I'm just waved through.
I think you do need one if you fly: they check it when you check in.
If travelling by ferry to Ireland the Gardai ask to see your passport to prove that you don't need your passport to travel.....
This is a huge deal. Exemplary damages are very rare in the employment tribunal. Theyre used to signal extreme disapproval of egregious behaviour, in this case by Social Work England, the regulator. Whoever gave SWE legal advice that didn't consist of "you've massively screwed up, apologise immediately, offer a decent settlement and undertake to get proper training in belief discrimination" really doesn't deserve to get further work. They're a very costly liability to clients.
I know well the lawyer who acted for Ms Meade. Not someone to be messed with.
This is a pretty significant case for regulators and employers. It's not just the exemplary damages on top of the normal compensation. Social Work England and Westminster City Council have also been ordered to provide proper training on equality law and freedom of speech not rely on the rubbish churned out by lobby groups making stuff up. Some of the stuff SWE was saying was so obviously - comically - wrong it was just embarrassing. And yet, even when given an opportunity to withdraw and apologise, they refused.
In the "Fitness to Practice" hearing - which SWE abandoned on the eve of the hearing - SWE's lawyer was Robin Moira White.....
Thames Water collapse could trigger Truss-style borrowing crisis, Whitehall officials fear
Exclusive: Concerns over effect on UK’s finances lead officials to believe utility should be renationalised before general election
Senior Whitehall officials fear Thames Water’s financial collapse could trigger a rise in government borrowing costs not seen since the chaos of the Liz Truss mini-budget, the Guardian can reveal.
Such is their concern about the impact on wider borrowing costs for the UK, even beyond utilities and infrastructure, that they believe Thames should be renationalised before the general election.
Officials in the Treasury and the UK’s Debt Management Office fear that, unless the UK’s biggest water company is renationalised as soon as possible, “prolonged uncertainty” about its fate could “damage confidence in UK plc at a sensitive time”, with elections in the UK and the US later this year.
This must absolutely, categorically be resisted. Fuck them. Fuck the greedy shareholders now expecting the taxpayer to bail them out; Fuck the Treasury; Fuck the Debt Management Office. This crappy business going bust is the best thing that can happen to the UK economy.
Quite.
If the current management of Thames Water thinks the business is insolvent, they need to be calling the administrators, not lobbying the government for a bail out.
(That said, I think it is more likely the debt holders than the shareholders who are arguing for nationalisation. If it were nationalized it would be for £1. But if it was, the government would take on the entire liabilities - i.e. all the debt. The correct thing is for the administrators to come in, find a new owner for the business, and say "sorry folks, you're getting 40 pence in the pound" to all the bond holders.)
As I understand it there are around 4 layers of seniority or equity and debt interest.
1) Shareholders: who own the regulated Thames Water entity. They have already defaulted on the debt owed to group 2, and will likely be wiped out.
2) High yield bond holders outside the regulated Thames Water entity. Interest payments have already been missed on this debt and it is trading at pennies in the pound. There is no way to service this debt without dividend payments from the regulated entity, which looks highly unlikely. Bleak prospect.
3 and 4) Junior and Senior bondholders within the regulated entity, which is structured as a whole business securitisation. Assuming a zero debt Thames Water entity has some value, group 4 should be getting at least some money back.
The trouble is that the level of uncertainty over the future amount of investment needed vs. bill increases permitted makes valuing the entity near impossible.
Which is also why it probably shouldn't have been privatised in the first place.
(1) If you remove all need to repay bondholders and to pay interest, then - before investments - Thames Water is highly - or perhaps even outrageously - profitable. It's EBITDA , that is Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization (otherwise known as pre-capital expenditure cash flows) were £627m in the last six months of 2023. It makes a close to 50% EBITDA margin. That's Google levels of profitability.
(2) Utilities rates are set according by the government according to the Regulated Asset Base. If investment is needed, then it can be reflected in future bills.
There is literally no reason whatsoever for the taxpayer to get involved, because it is in the interests in the debt holders of the regulated entity to keep it running. If Thames Water were to fail to live up to its contractual and regulatory obligations, then the bond holders would get literally zero.
The problem is not "is Thames Water profitable"? Because - at the operating level it is, indeed it is highly so. It is why has it got £15.5bn of debt.
Shareholders should get zero. Debt holders at the... speculative... end of the capital structure should get zero.
And the secured and senior creditors will probably get 60-75% of their money back.
And that should all happen without anyone losing water supply for even a minute.
It would appear that the gleeful report in the Guardian of the book's comparatively modest sales, reported equally gleefully by fat, unhappy people on PB (author's assumption), compared Truss's hardback sales with everybody else's hardback and paperback sales.
I am sure all on PB will wish the newly minted bestselling author and polemicist their hearty congratulations.
Hey, I bought Liz Truss's book, though I've not read it.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
The PFLP doesn't like the idea of a British military presence there:
"British troops would be 'treated as occupation forces and will be legitimate targets for the resistance'"
" 'Whoever wants to provide relief to the Palestinian people must press to stop the aggression, break the siege, and bring in relief aid through the official crossings in the Gaza Strip and under Palestinian management and supervision.' "
An obvious response is to say that surely bringing in aid through any route is a break in the siege.
But things aren't so simple when you consider that Israel seems about to attack Rafah, where the majority (~1.4 million) of the pre-October Gaza population are sheltering, and to terrorise survivors into leaving the city by fleeing to the north. Forget about getting out to Egypt.
The floating dock plan is being called a smokescreen to enable the invasion of Rafah.
As a benchmark, 1 million people in a square mile would be one person every 3.1 square yards. Rafah is much bigger than a square mile, but that won't be so of the areas to the north where evacuees would go.
It still looks to me as though the plan is a massacre followed by an "emergency" deportation with US help (and metal detectors) presumably to camps in Cyprus - another Nakba.
Ziad Issa, head of humanitarian policy at ActionAid UK: “A significant challenge remains with this plan: who will be responsible for delivering this aid on the ground? The time required for this new route to become operational is unlikely to address the urgent needs of those currently facing starvation and in dire need of food, water, and medical supplies.”
Indeed.
An Israeli assault in the West Bank and Jerusalem also seems possible.
No wonder Hamas and Fatah are in reconciliation talks right now in China.
Some people...they're just reflexive. Their bad intentions and magical thinking are written all the way through their personalities. Their whole way of looking at things is dirty. We all know their type.
Tory MP Tim Loughton detained and deported by African country with close links to China Former minister sanctioned by Beijing believes his expulsion from Djibouti was a ‘direct consequence’ of his criticism of the Chinese regime ... Djibouti, Africa’s smallest nation, has received billions of dollars of investment from China, including a new stadium, hospital and $1 billion (£791 million) space port. China has built a naval base in the country, stationed 2,000 troops there and holds more than $1.4 billion of Djibouti’s debt, 45 per cent of its GDP. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/28/tim-loughton-djibouti-detained-deported-china-sanctions/ (£££)
The deportation (or perhaps refusal of entry is a better way of putting it) happened three weeks ago but is posted here as a reminder that foreign aid does indeed bring soft power (especially the way China does it by building infrastructure rather than annual food dumps).
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
US carbon emissions have dropped dramatically since 2005, even as the population has risen, the number of cars has risen faster, and the number of miles driven faster yet.
This is a pattern that is being repeated across the world, as renewables are increasingly becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity, and electric car charging is sucking up excess capacity.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
US carbon emissions have dropped dramatically since 2005, even as the population has risen, the number of cars has risen faster, and the number of miles driven faster yet.
This is a pattern that is being repeated across the world, as renewables are increasingly becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity, and electric car charging is sucking up excess capacity.
And yet worldwide carbon emissions continue to rise (by 1.1% in 2023).
Humza is going to lose at least the VONC in him as First Minister, though his government is likely to survive a VONC because the Tories are frit.
The challenge for the SNP is find an alternative leader who not only every one of their MSPs can stomach but who is also acceptable to the Green MSPs.
My assumption is they will be successful but who ever gets the gig will be the supplicant to whatever demands the Greens or Salmond want to impose. I heard an interview with Salmond where he pointed out that minority rule means sensible policies and compromise. Not the divisive madness pursued by the SNP…
"Inside the fight for smartphone-free childhoods A rising number of parents want to ban under-16s from owning smartphones: “If it’s impossible for adults to regulate their emotions around phones, how can a 12-year-old?”
If they don't want their children to have smartphones, they should stop buying them and giving it to them. What kind of country have we built where people ask the Government to stop them doing things?
Well maybe, just maybe, they don't want to force their own child to be socially excluded because all the other children have smartphones.
As the article says
'But a majority of children in the UK do own a smartphone: 61 per cent of those aged three to 17 in 2021. This makes it difficult for concerned parents to intervene as it risks ostracising their child: “everyone else has one” is a persuasive plea. “It’s almost impossible as a parent to make your child the only one in the class without [a smartphone] because as soon as everyone has it, all the chat and organisation of social events [is] on the phone,”'
US carbon emissions have dropped dramatically since 2005, even as the population has risen, the number of cars has risen faster, and the number of miles driven faster yet.
This is a pattern that is being repeated across the world, as renewables are increasingly becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity, and electric car charging is sucking up excess capacity.
And yet worldwide carbon emissions continue to rise (by 1.1% in 2023).
Sure. But growth is slowing dramatically even in China.
Humza is going to lose at least the VONC in him as First Minister, though his government is likely to survive a VONC because the Tories are frit.
The challenge for the SNP is find an alternative leader who not only every one of their MSPs can stomach but who is also acceptable to the Green MSPs.
My assumption is they will be successful but who ever gets the gig will be the supplicant to whatever demands the Greens or Salmond want to impose. I heard an interview with Salmond where he pointed out that minority rule means sensible policies and compromise. Not the divisive madness pursued by the SNP…
The problem now is that the strongest candidate, Kate Forbes, is a rural conservative wee free, but the bulk of SNP support is Glasgow, progressive and largely anti-clerical. The fundamental problem for the SNP has been balancing the two kinds of nationalism, and Forbes probably alienates too many folk in the central belt. Labour are coming for the Nats in the central belt, so the next leader needs to bolster support there, which I'm not sure that Forbes can do. Even though I'd rate her well above the so-called progressive alternatives. The SNP has to find someone acceptable to the Greens, but all the candidates on that wing of the party are, shall we say, not very good.
Rishi Sunak is announcing the General Election date 1037hrs 13th May.The 2024 General Election is being held on 4th July. Parliament will end on 23rd May.
There is only one political party who can be seen to lose this election from here, so it will be a very difficult campaign for Labour, obvious jitters with polls tightening once election called. 9th May BOE interest rate cut announced, 10th May UK comes out of recession with good first quarter growth, 22nd May Inflation will fall below 2% - no arguing or doubt about this because its based on energy prices. Also in the campaign period at least 1 flight will take off for Rwanda, perhaps more with one on eve of polling. The sunny economic news will contrast with the depth of credit crisis in voters minds and credit given to Rishi and Hunt for the financial turnaround pulls rug from under Labours best argument for voters to switch to them. The Rwanda flights will return Ref voters back to the Conservatives. You can say recent polling on Rwanda doesn’t suggest the Rwanda flights will generate a stampede of Ref back to Con, and I will laugh at you because that hypothetical polling is a poor predictive measure for how humans radically change their views once elections are called and Rwanda flights are happening.
Also as background narrative to the campaign, the last week of June and into July will be near record breaking heatwave in UK, throwing attention to how major parties have backed away from climate commitments ahead of this election. Escalating events in the Gaza War will return to the conflict to greater attention than it is currently getting, and make UKs political leaders look impotent and without influence at the worst possible moment for them.
I can give you the July election result right now, in shares and seats.
CON33 LAB39 LDM16 REF3 GRN4 SNP2
CON180 LAB379 LDM48 REF0 GRN1 (Bristols not Brightons) SNP21 PLD4
Consider this my entry in the inevitable PB competition when it comes.
I can't decide if this is performance art or a genuine mental health crisis.
I laughed like I drain when I read this.
But truth is, even with just the 6 % election win, it results thanks mainly to Brexit driven and Corbyn gone tactical voting, in still an historic Labour majority from such low starting position, Libdems winning many seats too, and the Tories down to 180.
There’s a centre right pro Brexit bloc out there right now of about 37/38 %. It’s not crazy to anticipate the polls to start tightening once the election is called, even down to just 6 or 7 % gap come the end - becuase that’s the science of what FPTP does. The Tory election campaign does not need to win over lots of different voter groups for this dramatic tightening, just a significant chunk of the double digit Reform polling.
During election campaigns the incumbent party has tended to lose ground to the opposition - partly because the latter then receives equal media coverage by broadcasters etc. Swingback as such really only tends to apply to the period leading up to the formal election campaign itself.
Hmm.
Not true of 1964, 1970, Oct 1974, 1983, 1992, 1997 or 2005.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
The PFLP doesn't like the idea of a British military presence there:
This seems mad even by the fractured and incoherent standards of Abu Hunter's foreign policy machinations.
The US are giving the Zionist Entity all the weapons in the world to blow the fuck out of Gaza causing a humanitarian catastrophe so then the US wants to build Tracy Island in the Mediterranean littoral and have a "partner nation" deliver the aid ashore because the Israelis have told them to fuck off when it comes to delivering it any other way.
Rishi wants his fucking Playmobil sized head examining if he puts British forces anywhere near this.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
Why did you feel the need to make a partisan point over something historical?
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
Why did you feel the need to make a partisan point over something historical?
It’s very jarring.
I'm not making a partisan point. I am explaining why so many were attracted to communism by a combination of economic depression at home and appeasement of Nazi aggression abroad.
The Labour VONC in his government has complicated things a bit. The SNP presumably do not want to go into an election without a leader. What he needs is some form of trade whereby, in exchange for him personally resigning the Greens or Alba agree to abstain or vote against the Labour VONC. That may well do doable.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
Why did you feel the need to make a partisan point over something historical?
It’s very jarring.
I'm not making a partisan point. I am mexplaining why so many were attracted to communism by a combination of economic depression at home and appeasement of Nazi aggression abroad.
So why identify the party of government? It’s irrelevant
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
Particularly so in the early Thirties when much of the British Establishment openly admired Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Less so when leftist criticism of Stalin from a Trotskyite perspective grew in the late Thirties.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
Yes but at the time, the evils of communism were not known.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
There are echoes in our present times. The current reactionary right wing populismso prevalent across the West (ironically often Pro-Putin) drives people seeking to fight it to the Left (ironically also often Pro-Putin).
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
And also, far more people than we might wish don’t give it a great deal of thought, and if they are angry with the status quo and those running it, will cast a vote for anyone who they think will shake things up and give the “establishment” what it deserves, without spending any time thinking through where it might lead, or even having any faith that things would improve if they win. Cf a certain Trump in the US. Or, indeed, Brexit.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
Yes but at the time, the evils of communism were not known.
They were, actually. The famines of 1921 and 1930 had been well-documented by journalists based in the west, even as useful idiots shut their eyes to them. And everybody could see the chaos unleashed by the purges.
As for the rest, you talk about ‘postwar revisionism,’ but the idea of ‘appeasement’ as a policy is actually in-war and post-war revisionism largely from the work of Michael Foot and Winston Churchill.
Just as the evils of Nazi Germany were increasingly obvious from 1934 onwards and criticism of them rose in lock step with them. But one reason for the unwillingness to push Germany too far is that Communism was (wrongly as it happens) still seen as even worse.
Social factors I will give you, to an extent, although most Communists involved in spying came from very wealthy backgrounds. McLean’s father, for example, was a former Leader of the Opposition.
I think admiration of Communism among the youth was as much of anything a symptom of youthful rebellion.
Sweden's economy has contracted four quarters in a row. Looks like they have a similar mortgage structure to the UK, unlike many European countries:
"The largest Nordic economy has been hit harder by rising borrowing costs than most of its European peers, as many households have large debts with interest rates fixed on short terms. That has led to lower spending at the same time as a plunge in housing construction has pushed the economy into a contraction, with output shrinking since the second quarter of last year." (Bloomberg).
This could become fascinating. The RoI sounds like it will expect the UK to behave (ie have Ireland's migrants returned to UK) exactly as France does not behave in relation to to UK.
The ramifications - EU relations, GFA, Brexit deal, CTA, open border etc - are substantial.
It’s gestural from Ireland. There’s no way they can return migrants from the EU to the UK without the EU reciprocating - allowing the UK to return the boat people to France. Not going to happen
If a coach travels from Dublin to Glasgow via Belfast, at what point do UK Border Force check whether the people on board have visas or passports?
When they arrive at Glasgow, I believe.
You don't need a passport to get from Ireland to the UK. I regularly travel back and forth by car ferry and I've never once been asked for my passport, or indeed for any identification. I'm just waved through.
This is true if you're in your own car, but you have your passport checked on entry to Ireland from the UK if you fly, or you are a foot/coach passenger on the ferry.
Because, of course, £33 Billion is equally affordable to £300,000
Every little helps.
Why pick on the weakest and most vulnerable in society is my question when we can fly the Foreign Secretary around Africa on a jolly for a third of a million pounds?
Of course I wasn't judging equality of cost, just value for money.
"Sánchez on the edge: Will Spain’s prime minister resign?"
The reign in Spain fails mainly in plain sight?
"The conservative opposition has also helped spread malicious rumors that his wife is actually a man,"
The sort of hideous line that @Leon is spreading about Macron's wife.
Bonjour!
Its beautiful here
(Camaret-sur-Mer, Cornouaille, Bretagne)
Point of order: I explicitly said I do NOT believe the mad rumours about Mme Macron, rather I said the Macrons’ weird inability to scotch them (eg show us the 3000 photos of her as a young woman? Non, we’re going to prosecute journalists who say this instead) tells me they are hiding something, but it is something ELSE. And in this it reminds me of the Palace and Kate and the weird silence then weirder photo. We now know why. There WAS something hidden
I’ve since heard fairly plausible rumours what it is re the Macrons, given that I am in France I shall not trouble @TSE and @rcs1000 by saying anything and invoking French lawyers
If he’d flown Ryanair, Miss Thornberry would have been complaining that it didn’t project a serious image for the UK foreign sec abroad. She’s one of the the worst types of hypocrite politician.
Of course, it’s not just Cameron on the plane, there will be a group of FO staff and media hanging-on to his coat-tails as always, the latter of which are expected to contribute to the cost of travel, and a modern plane of the right size will be much more efficient than a too-large or older aircraft.
Of all the things for which the government can rightly be critisised, sending the foreign secretary or trade secretary on trips abroad really isn’t one of them. Cameron should be living on a plane at the moment, getting as much support as possible for Ukraine in particular.
This could become fascinating. The RoI sounds like it will expect the UK to behave (ie have Ireland's migrants returned to UK) exactly as France does not behave in relation to to UK.
The ramifications - EU relations, GFA, Brexit deal, CTA, open border etc - are substantial.
It’s gestural from Ireland. There’s no way they can return migrants from the EU to the UK without the EU reciprocating - allowing the UK to return the boat people to France. Not going to happen
If a coach travels from Dublin to Glasgow via Belfast, at what point do UK Border Force check whether the people on board have visas or passports?
When they arrive at Glasgow, I believe.
You don't need a passport to get from Ireland to the UK. I regularly travel back and forth by car ferry and I've never once been asked for my passport, or indeed for any identification. I'm just waved through.
I think you do need one if you fly: they check it when you check in.
AFAIK you don't legally need a passport for journey but the airlines insist so, practically, you do. For land/sea crossings there is no check as we are in a Common Travel Area.
Simon Harris can bluster about returning migrants to the UK but the CTA means they can pop back whenever they want.
I don't think the CTA says anything about passport checks. Ireland enforced passport checks on foot and coach passengers on the ferries so that they can check for those travellers who aren't British, Irish, or European, and don't have a visa.
The CTA isn't a British/Irish version of Schengen.
"Sánchez on the edge: Will Spain’s prime minister resign?"
The reign in Spain fails mainly in plain sight?
"The conservative opposition has also helped spread malicious rumors that his wife is actually a man,"
The sort of hideous line that @Leon is spreading about Macron's wife.
Bonjour!
Its beautiful here
(Snip)
Point of order: I explicitly said I do NOT believe the mad rumours about Mme Macron, rather I said the Macrons’ weird inability to scotch them (eg show us the 3000 photos of her as a young woman? Non, we’re going to prosecute journalists who say this instead) tells me they are hiding something, but it is something ELSE. And in this it reminds me of the Palace and Kate and the weird silence then weirder photo. We now know why. There WAS something hidden
I’ve since heard fairly plausible rumours what it is re the Macrons, given that I am in France I shall not trouble @TSE and @rcs1000 by saying anything and invoking French lawyers
No, you say you don't believe them, but you consistently spread them. That makes you.... something nasty. It's bullshit, and you're nose-deep in the swill.
The idea that you have the capability to decide when something is 'plausible' or not is hilarious. You live for the dramatic; and the more dramatic something is, the more you want to believe and spread it.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
Yes but at the time, the evils of communism were not known.
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
Or not....
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does. If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
Yes, I've got Miranda Carter's book on Anthony Blunt. I was sceptical of this new claim. Presumably the Soviets' motivation was to slow up the allies and allow the Red Army to capture Eastern Europe and Germany. The trouble with that theory is the opposite is just as plausible in that the allied advance would tie up the Wehrmacht on the Western Front.
I haven't read the book, and don't know much about Blunt. But of the classic four reasons to spy, which might apply? (Combinations also apply.)
Money Ideology Coercion Ego
Blunt was, like many of his contemporaries at Cambridge, a communist. Remember at home we had a depression and hunger marches, while in Europe fascism was on the rise, and Britain was appeasing Nazi Germany, not opposing it. So for both reasons, communism appeared to be the answer. The Soviet Union was a workers paradise, and of course ideologically opposed to fascism. The horrors of Stalin's Russia had yet to be revealed.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
I think it's more complex than that. for instance, Philby classed himself as a communist and anti-Imperialist. Yet when it was clear the USSR was imperialist when it gobbled up large chunks of eastern Europe, he continued spying for them.
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
It was not just the left who opposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. There was Churchill, of course, supported by a lot of gay MPs (Why gay? Because they were the ones who holidayed in Germany and saw at first hand what the Nazis were doing: think Cabaret.)
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
I think that’s somewhat oversimplifying it as well. The understanding of the government was that they were not ready to fight a war and that therefore they should not seek one. There wasn’t so much an officially policy of ‘appeasement’ as Churchill labelled it as a conscious attempt to avoid bellicosity in any given circumstance.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
That misses the point. The attraction of communism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing fascism and also raising workers' living standards.
The other view:
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
There are echoes in our present times. The current reactionary right wing populismso prevalent across the West (ironically often Pro-Putin) drives people seeking to fight it to the Left (ironically also often Pro-Putin).
Oddly though, the 'populismso' we see on our streets, from the pro-Hamas protests on our streets to the Extinction Rebellion type people, are generally of the left.
If he’d flown Ryanair, Miss Thornberry would have been complaining that it didn’t project a serious image for the UK foreign sec abroad. She’s one of the the worst types of hypocrite politician.
Of course, it’s not just Cameron on the plane, there will be a group of FO staff and media hanging-on to his coat-tails as always, the latter of which are expected to contribute to the cost of travel, and a modern plane of the right size will be much more efficient than a too-large or older aircraft.
Of all the things for which the government can rightly be critisised, sending the foreign secretary or trade secretary on trips abroad really isn’t one of them. Cameron should be living on a plane at the moment, getting as much support as possible for Ukraine in particular.
Yes many pigs slurping at the trough makes it sound much better.
Comments
(2) Utilities rates are set according by the government according to the Regulated Asset Base. If investment is needed, then it can be reflected in future bills.
There is literally no reason whatsoever for the taxpayer to get involved, because it is in the interests in the debt holders of the regulated entity to keep it running. If Thames Water were to fail to live up to its contractual and regulatory obligations, then the bond holders would get literally zero.
The problem is not "is Thames Water profitable"? Because - at the operating level it is, indeed it is highly so. It is why has it got £15.5bn of debt.
Shareholders should get zero. Debt holders at the... speculative... end of the capital structure should get zero.
And the secured and senior creditors will probably get 60-75% of their money back.
And that should all happen without anyone losing water supply for even a minute.
They are after our infrastructure again, or rather, still.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/28/astrazeneca-admits-covid-vaccine-causes-rare-side-effect/ (£££)
This will bring out the anti-vaxxers.
https://x.com/themajorityscot/status/1784665922931769655
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/28/cambridge-spy-may-have-helped-nazis-new-book-suggests/ (£££)
Someone's done a book claiming that Operation Market Garden (as in A Bridge Too Far) was leaked to the Nazis by a spy codenamed Josephine, and that Josephine was Blunt, who MI5 had charged with tracking down Josephine. (Robert Verkaik, The Traitor of Arnhem...)
On Thursday 670,000 residents can decide whether to unseat their Conservative mayor, a close ally of Boris Johnson — but few voters seem aware of the contest
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-houchen-tees-valley-mayoral-election-tories-5fw5kc7qb (£££)
SNP figures are told of first minister’s intentions
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/humza-yousaf-set-to-resign-as-survival-hopes-fade-rwr2f5p0j (£££)
Rush to watch that Apprentice/Yousaf mashup video before it is no longer current.
The PFLP doesn't like the idea of a British military presence there:
"British troops would be 'treated as occupation forces and will be legitimate targets for the resistance'"
" 'Whoever wants to provide relief to the Palestinian people must press to stop the aggression, break the siege, and bring in relief aid through the official crossings in the Gaza Strip and under Palestinian management and supervision.' "
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/pflp-says-it-will-target-british-forces-if-they-are-deployed-gaza
An obvious response is to say that surely bringing in aid through any route is a break in the siege.
But things aren't so simple when you consider that Israel seems about to attack Rafah, where the majority (~1.4 million) of the pre-October Gaza population are sheltering, and to terrorise survivors into leaving the city by fleeing to the north. Forget about getting out to Egypt.
The floating dock plan is being called a smokescreen to enable the invasion of Rafah.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/24/officials-voice-concern-over-us-plans-for-gaza-aid-pier
As a benchmark, 1 million people in a square mile would be one person every 3.1 square yards. Rafah is much bigger than a square mile, but that won't be so of the areas to the north where evacuees would go.
It still looks to me as though the plan is a massacre followed by an "emergency" deportation with US help (and metal detectors) presumably to camps in Cyprus - another Nakba.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/24/officials-voice-concern-over-us-plans-for-gaza-aid-pier
Ziad Issa, head of humanitarian policy at ActionAid UK: “A significant challenge remains with this plan: who will be responsible for delivering this aid on the ground? The time required for this new route to become operational is unlikely to address the urgent needs of those currently facing starvation and in dire need of food, water, and medical supplies.”
Indeed.
An Israeli assault in the West Bank and Jerusalem also seems possible.
No wonder Hamas and Fatah are in reconciliation talks right now in China.
It's this week now
It was next week then
But that was last week
And now week after next is next week now
You're welcome.
Former minister sanctioned by Beijing believes his expulsion from Djibouti was a ‘direct consequence’ of his criticism of the Chinese regime
...
Djibouti, Africa’s smallest nation, has received billions of dollars of investment from China, including a new stadium, hospital and $1 billion (£791 million) space port. China has built a naval base in the country, stationed 2,000 troops there and holds more than $1.4 billion of Djibouti’s debt, 45 per cent of its GDP.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/28/tim-loughton-djibouti-detained-deported-china-sanctions/ (£££)
The deportation (or perhaps refusal of entry is a better way of putting it) happened three weeks ago but is posted here as a reminder that foreign aid does indeed bring soft power (especially the way China does it by building infrastructure rather than annual food dumps).
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/28/david-blunkett-says-devising-99-year-prison-sentences-ipp-is-his-biggest-regret
Although Blunkett blames loose drafting and judges doling out these sentences like confetti for repeated minor offences.
A thread: I have only read this article and NOT the book from which it derives, but as the author of the standard biography of Anthony Blunt, I feel inclined to comment. The main contention is that not only was Blunt spying for the Soviets, but that he was...
also ‘agent Josephine’ who passed incredibly damaging info from inside MI5 to the Nazis. It’s a big accusation, which I don’t think the article stands up. Maybe the book does.
If you’re going to make a serious argument about someone like Anthony Blunt, around whom much nonsense...
& conspiracy theory has accumulated over the years, you should get all your facts right. There are mistakes, and I feel, misrepresentations, in the article. They may be small things, but if you have ‘uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century,/
https://x.com/MJCarter10/status/1784684731302392070
Humza Yousaf is considering quitting as Scotland's first minister rather than face two confidence votes, BBC News understands.
A source close to Mr Yousaf said that resignation was now an option but a final decision had not yet been taken.
"The clock has been ticking ever downwards," the source told the BBC on Sunday night.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c72p91kznz8o
US carbon emissions have dropped dramatically since 2005, even as the population has risen, the number of cars has risen faster, and the number of miles driven faster yet.
This is a pattern that is being repeated across the world, as renewables are increasingly becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity, and electric car charging is sucking up excess capacity.
I had no idea she was a serious historian.
Money
Ideology
Coercion
Ego
Humza be good
The challenge for the SNP is find an alternative leader who not only every one of their MSPs can stomach but who is also acceptable to the Green MSPs.
My assumption is they will be successful but who ever gets the gig will be the supplicant to whatever demands the Greens or Salmond want to impose. I heard an interview with Salmond where he pointed out that minority rule means sensible policies and compromise. Not the divisive madness pursued by the SNP…
As the article says
'But a majority of children in the UK do own a smartphone: 61 per cent of those aged three to 17 in 2021. This makes it difficult for concerned parents to intervene as it risks ostracising their child: “everyone else has one” is a persuasive plea. “It’s almost impossible as a parent to make your child the only one in the class without [a smartphone] because as soon as everyone has it, all the chat and organisation of social events [is] on the phone,”'
Not true of 1964, 1970, Oct 1974, 1983, 1992, 1997 or 2005.
I think that’s an oversimplification.
Of course, left to his own devices, Blunt would have been a marxist art historian for a while and no harm done.
What prevented that was the Cambridge spy ring, to which Blunt was recruited by his friend, Guy Burgess.
"Philby confirmed that he had worked for the KGB and that "his purpose in life was to destroy imperialism""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
I think there's an unhealthy amount of hatred of Britain at the extreme left. Some of the same sorts of people who are trying to appease Putin now.
Rishi Sunak really does despise people who can't fend for themselves.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0ry09d50wo.amp
From a position of being quite impressed by the guy, I consider him beyond immoral. He's a bully, he picks off those weakest first.
https://x.com/euanmccolm/status/1784816246963204296
"Sánchez on the edge: Will Spain’s prime minister resign?"
The US are giving the Zionist Entity all the weapons in the world to blow the fuck out of Gaza causing a humanitarian catastrophe so then the US wants to build Tracy Island in the Mediterranean littoral and have a "partner nation" deliver the aid ashore because the Israelis have told them to fuck off when it comes to delivering it any other way.
Rishi wants his fucking Playmobil sized head examining if he puts British forces anywhere near this.
The sort of hideous line that @Leon is spreading about Macron's wife.
But appeasement was the official policy of the Conservative government of the United Kingdom.
It’s very jarring.
The real mistake was not so much the policies involved as the bombast that accompanied them. Had Chamberlain made a low key return from Munich saying ‘crisis defused and now we call upon Herr Hitler to respect the treaty’ he would have suffered far less damage than by saying ‘peace for our time.’
Unfortunately Chamberlain didn’t seem to have grasped either the character of Hitler, the nuances of the military and diplomatic situation or the importance of backing diplomatic triumphs with armed force. Moreover, he had a horror of war and would do almost anything to avoid it. In this he was hardly alone, of course. His brother was shrewder but had died before Munich.
But some of his critics are just silly. One Marxist historian at Oxford in the 1980s suggested that in 1938 after the Anschluss Chamberlain should have formed an alliance through the League of Nations and pursued aggressive military containment of Germany. That’s nonsense on stilts on so many levels given the covenant of the League, its then level of influence and the reaction of likely allies I’m amazed it was even published.
The Labour VONC in his government has complicated things a bit. The SNP presumably do not want to go into an election without a leader. What he needs is some form of trade whereby, in exchange for him personally resigning the Greens or Alba agree to abstain or vote against the Labour VONC. That may well do doable.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/28/david-cameron-under-fire-for-hiring-42m-luxury-jet-for-central-asia-tour
"The attraction of fascism in the 1930s is not to be explained by postwar revisionism. It has to be done in terms of how things looked *at the time* both in terms of opposing communism and also raising workers' living standards."
My view is simply that Communism and fascism are both evil ideologies that have killed millions of people. They simply do not work in practice, and the idea "next time it will be different!" is laughable. Yet because it is cloaked in an insubstantial wreath of goodness, Communism is seen by some as being 'acceptable'. It isn't.
As for the rest, you talk about ‘postwar revisionism,’ but the idea of ‘appeasement’ as a policy is actually in-war and post-war revisionism largely from the work of Michael Foot and Winston Churchill.
Just as the evils of Nazi Germany were increasingly obvious from 1934 onwards and criticism of them rose in lock step with them. But one reason for the unwillingness to push Germany too far is that Communism was (wrongly as it happens) still seen as even worse.
Social factors I will give you, to an extent, although most Communists involved in spying came from very wealthy backgrounds. McLean’s father, for example, was a former Leader of the Opposition.
I think admiration of Communism among the youth was as much of anything a symptom of youthful rebellion.
NEW THREAD
"The largest Nordic economy has been hit harder by rising borrowing costs than most of its European peers, as many households have large debts with interest rates fixed on short terms. That has led to lower spending at the same time as a plunge in housing construction has pushed the economy into a contraction, with output shrinking since the second quarter of last year." (Bloomberg).
Why pick on the weakest and most vulnerable in society is my question when we can fly the Foreign Secretary around Africa on a jolly for a third of a million pounds?
Of course I wasn't judging equality of cost, just value for money.
Its beautiful here
(Camaret-sur-Mer, Cornouaille, Bretagne)
Point of order: I explicitly said I do NOT believe the mad rumours about Mme Macron, rather I said the Macrons’ weird inability to scotch them (eg show us the 3000 photos of her as a young woman? Non, we’re going to prosecute journalists who say this instead) tells me they are hiding something, but it is something ELSE. And in this it reminds me of the Palace and Kate and the weird silence then weirder photo. We now know why. There WAS something hidden
I’ve since heard fairly plausible rumours what it is re the Macrons, given that I am in France I shall not trouble @TSE and @rcs1000 by saying anything and invoking French lawyers
Of course, it’s not just Cameron on the plane, there will be a group of FO staff and media hanging-on to his coat-tails as always, the latter of which are expected to contribute to the cost of travel, and a modern plane of the right size will be much more efficient than a too-large or older aircraft.
Of all the things for which the government can rightly be critisised, sending the foreign secretary or trade secretary on trips abroad really isn’t one of them. Cameron should be living on a plane at the moment, getting as much support as possible for Ukraine in particular.
The CTA isn't a British/Irish version of Schengen.
The idea that you have the capability to decide when something is 'plausible' or not is hilarious. You live for the dramatic; and the more dramatic something is, the more you want to believe and spread it.