The BNP and the anti-immigrant who is emigrating

This is from a few days back...

The British National Party - the ultra-Right party with a pathological hatred of immigrants - has been forced by law to scrap its whites-only membership laws. Members voted to change the party's constitution so that black and Asian people can join - if you can imagine that they would want to.

The leader Nick Griffin - a Holocaust denier - said on Sunday anyone can join if they agree that the country should stay "fundamentally British"... thereby being suitably vague while ensuring that everyone knows exactly what he means.

A funny sequel to this is their extension of an offer of membership to none other than Australia's own Pauline Hanson, who after years of banshee-like wailing on the fringes of Australian politics has decided that, for all her oft-professed patriotism, she will say goodbye to Australia "forever" and emigrate to Britain.

Griffin said she would not be regarded as an ''immigrant sponger'' .
What charm.

Pauline Hanson is a sort of Australian Palin except without Palin's physical appeal and a voice that is actually more grating on the ear, if you can believe that. She opposed non-white immigration and generally had well-deserved pariah status among the major parties.

Goodbye Pauline. Good riddance and don't come crawling back when you discover the weather is not as nice as it is in Queensland.

Blair unrepentant

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he had no regrets over the invasion of Iraq...

No matter the lack of WMDs, the intense public disquiet, the massive number of casualties and the subsequent debacle of a failing occupation... he thinks it was worth it. More troubling, he says Iran presents the same opportunity to mount pre-emptive slaughter.

As you will have worked out by now, I am of the opinion that the war was a catastrophe for the rule of law and the struggle against terrorism. For what little it counts, I was of this opinion before the coalition of the willingly fooled even went into Iraq.

"So you'd prefer Saddam Hussein was still in power?" is the inevitable cheap retort (and strawman argument).
The answer is "no, I would prefer he'd have been removed by means other than full scale invasion".
Tracking this hypothetical exchange to its next evolution, I would then come under attack for hypocrisy and "moral confusion"...

As if moral clarity automatically means "...invade". It does not.
There is nothing clouded about my morality: I think massive unnecessary death is a very bad thing. I think creating a beacon for terrorism in the Middle East was a very bad thing. And I think deception of the public about how, why and when the decision was arrived at... was a very bad thing.

Much has been made of Blair's religious bent in how he arrived at his decisions.

Matthew Parris, formerly a conservative MP, writes:

"Tony Blair is a Manichean, or dualist. He believes that the Universe is best understood as an eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, in contention for dominance. Christians are supposed to believe that the battle is already won, and Mr Blair’s dualism is (paradoxically) closer to Islamic fundamentalism than to the Gospels. For Mr Blair at least “Axis of Evil” was not just a Bushite soundbite: it was a profound philosophical insight into the meaning of world history."

I'm personally not convinced that Christians are in fact supposed to believe the battle is already won, but whatever... rigid dualism in politics is dangerous, is the point.
All 'our' enemies are not, in fact, friends of one another. Acting is if they are, or as if the fact doesn't matter... is stupidly dangerous. It DOES matter. How destroying Al-Qaeda transformed into taking down a regime who were hated by Al-Qaeda and who had nothing to do with 9/11 will become a paradox of policy that will darkly entertain students, teachers and observers of political theory for centuries to come, should civilisation live so long (I like to think it will).

Parris categorises the different types of people who are bitter about Blair's lack of repentance into original opposers of the war (like me), hindsight critics, and another group: "most ominously of all, a number who have not really repented of their doctrine of muscular interventionism, are now eyeing up Iran, and badly need to distinguish between what happened last time and what might happen if we try it again."

Comments by Parris in The Times Online, sourced here.