Moderation in action?

This is the sort of thing with which we respectfully disagree.

The BBC published a story with a headline which misrepresented the nuances of President Bush's speech on the progress of the war in Iraq, and later replaced the phrase "Bush speech hails Iraq 'victory'" with "Bush says Iraq invasion was right". What Bush actually said was The surge has ... opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

I have no beef with the suggestion that this is an editorial misjudgement by the BBC and that they were right to replace the headline, nor that the original headline misrepresented the president, and probably relied more on stereotyped views of Bush's policy than on a close reading of the text. But does serving justice on a misleading headline really require the marvellously-named Monkey Tennis Centre, despite its commendably thorough coverage and checking of this little volte-face, to be bandying around a clutch of accusations that this is "a thoroughness worthy of Orwell's Ministry of Truth"; "deceitful editing of the story, and [an] equally deceitful headline"; "dishonestly headlined, mendaciously edited"; and "spectacularly dishonest"? Perhaps. But our line is that it doesn't. The BBC, like all news agencies, offers its reportage as products in the marketplace of ideas, and it's up to us to take or leave, learn or ignore as we see fit.

We can't expect to have both constant, around-the-clock, up-to-the-minute coverage of everything and 100% impartiality of language. That's not to say we shouldn't expect accuracy, but we can take into account the pressures of maintaining this level of self-imposed pressure by the media and consider how well organisations are doing overall. Political bias is one thing, but this is a matter of subtlety of phrasing, and launching a little anti-BBC tirade is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I've heard twenty-four-hour news described beautifully as "a stream of information unleavened by understanding or analysis", which seems to sum up what happened here. And it was fixed, after all.

(Another tension, it seems to me, is that between the world of "Web 2.0" and user-generated content on the one hand, and the idea that we are all helpless consumers in that marketplace of ideas, forced to choose only between the sparse millions of pieces of information provided for us and completely unable to make our own judgements and hold our own counsel, but perhaps that's for another day).

Of far more importance is another point in the same post: is it reasonable for a fully-moderated comments section to publish opinions by members of the public that Bush and Blair should be "hanged" for their "crimes"? On that one, as on the general insistence on the highest standards in the media, we are fully behind the Monkey Tennis Centre. But perhaps these aims can be better achieved by moderation than by tubthumping.

Entente Amicale

The last few days have been full of news about the visit of the French president to Britain. There has been a healthy amount of cliche-jockeying, principally about what the Entente Cordiale now looks like (is it this, this or this?), and plenty of froth about the president's wife, although only a little in the way of explanation for the choice of venue for talks between Mr Sarkozy and Mr Brown.

But all in, your humble Stationmaster is surprised and pleased by the generally moderate and approving tone of coverage. British media attitudes towards France seem to veer from the frosty to the xenophobic, all for no substantial reason. So it's been impressive and encouraging to see a new innovation in British foreign policy, a real sense that we are moving on from the muddled and awkward Blair-Chirac years, and taking a sensible and positive attitude towards our venerable neighbour.

Genius.

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

British values?

These are some of the responses on the BBC's Have Your Say section to the suggestion that teenagers should declare their allegiance to Queen and Country.

Every citizen should swear allegiance to our Queen, obviously this will be unpopular amongst teenagers who are invariably anarchist.

Stop terrorising us all threats and pernicious legislation that criminalises what would otherwise be law abiding folk.

I personally would sooner vomit myself inside out than swear allegiance to the Queen. I find the whole concept quite grotesque.

We are sick of the way we are betrayed by this government.

Didn't Hitler try the same thing?

THIS IS THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS AND DISGUSTING THING I'VE HEARD IN YEARS.

If there's anyone that should pledge allegience to put British interests first, it should be the Labour government!
Gordon Brown, Tony Bliar - I'm talking about you!
This imbecile Britain-hating government always puts foreign interests first, like when Gordon Clown gave 1 billion worth of aids to China and India the other month!

I'm shaking my head in despair, I really am.

Fingers crossed for Clinton...

Don't ask me to do the maths again, but I was mentally doodling earlier and decided that Britain would be worth 77 electoral college votes if it were the fifty-first state. Heavens, we'd have half as many votes again as California has now. So who, forgive the vainglory, would I wish to see 'our votes' go to in the presidential election in January? Well, I got one word for you, buddy: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I base this judgement on my main area of interest when it comes to who sits in the big chair in the round room over the pond: foreign policy. I'm not going to claim to be the closest observer, just a sort of cross between your average joe and your political ubergeek. I've watched snippets of the candidates on British and US news, seen the odd debate, and (here's the geekery) read what McCain, Huckabee, Clinton and Obama make of foreign policy in the snappily-titled Foreign Affairs. For me, without a doubt, Clinton comes out on top. Which surprised me, because I thought I would be pretty happy with either Obama or Clinton, and possibly even McCain - after all, the overall impression is of a swing to the sensible centre after the madness of President Bush.

I won't bore you with the details - you can always read up for yourself (and what Romney, Giuliani and Edwards thought too). But the upshot is that Senator Clinton is the only candidate who seems to me to be coherent and adventurous in the name of common-sense, practical politics -at least inasmuch as anybody can be when they are constrained by the patriotic fantasy of the US political worldview. She may give in at times, in her article and latterly in her campaigning, to the rhetoric of terrorism and national security, but she is never strident in the way that Governor Huckabee is ("We are living on borrowed time...I understand the threats we face today. When I am president, America will look this evil in the eye, confront it, defeat it, and emerge stronger than ever". Nice).

The real surprise for me was the vacuity of Senator Obama's views. I hadn't heard anything from him about foreign policy in the news, so I'm left only with his own Foreign Affairs article. The caveat that it is from last summer doesn't really alleviate my horror at some of his claims and initiatives. For instance, Obama seems to suggest that the US should withdraw from Iraq for the prime purpose of compelling Iraqi politicians to reach their own peace deal:
"The best chance we have to leave Iraq a better place is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political solution. And the only effective way to apply this pressure is to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008."

It seems to me that "pressuring Iraq's leaders to finally get serious about resolving their differences" is what you might call "completely bonkers". The notion that the very idea of peace is so powerful that it will eclipse all other considerations in a divided nation is not just simplistic but dangerous, fitting much more nicely with a happy view of a peaceful, America-led free world than with the rather more threatening reality.

The rest of Obama's views are similarly wafer-thin. One comparison with Clinton stands out for me: he spends a paragraph setting out all the environmental calamities which may befall us in the near future: rising sea levels, crop failures and famine, disease and poverty. His sonorous conclusion to this? "That means increased instability in some of the most volatile parts of the world." You could have knocked me down with a feather. Thanks, Barack. Meanwhile, Clinton is busy boring the pants of her readers with proposals for an "E-8" forum of the naughtiest global carbon-emitting economies, like the G-8 but in order to shove green issues to the forefront of international politics.

All this is not to say that President Obama (will they really swallow that idea on election day?) would be a Bad Thing. For all his vacuities (his solution to the genocide in Darfur, for instances, is to "rebuild our ties to our allies in Europe and Asia and strengthen our partnerships throughout the Americas and Africa") there is plenty of his trademark rhetoric, so eloquent as to inspire rather than fall flat like the usual politician's platitudes. And I suppose this is more powerful to a domestic audience than a foreign observer like me, looking for reassurance that America will have new ideas from next January which might actually make the world a better place. Obama's rhetoric points in that direction, but it's Clinton who seems to have the policies to get there.

So, Hillary looks to me like far and away the best candidate, so bravo for her rescue by Ohio and Texas the other day. Of course, if Britain had those 77 electoral college votes then it wouldn't be foreign policy which informs my decision. Besides, whether it's Clinton, Obama or McCain is unaffected by foreign opinion and in any case will be a welcome, welcome change from the incumbent. Which makes this post either circular, or redundant. A perfect addition to the blogosphere, in fact. Enjoy.

Alas, poor Clegg.

Oh, dear. Poor Liberal Democrats.

Nick Clegg seems to have tried to take the political high ground here. Having upped the ante last week on the European issue, presumably in an attempt to expose the hidden fault lines which must still run through the Conservative party and are increasingly plaguing Labour, he has now got himself into an awful twist.

As one of the Moderation Stationmaster's staff points out, if Clegg had directed his party to vote "no" on a Lisbon Treaty referendum they would have looked vindictive, whereas if he had required them to support the referendum, they would have looked weak and indecisive. But the end result - insisting that they abstain - just looked weird.

There's nothing wrong with Clegg's view - that the real debate is in fact over whether Britain should stay in the EU or not. He's right to see the Lisbon Treaty as a straw man for general public frustration with the Union. But if he believes that the path to a sensible resolution of all this is reached by moderation and consensus, then he was ill-advised to use a three-line whip to reach it, especially when a free vote would have given the same message without the policy contortions.

Seems to me another instance of moderation and common sense being squeezed out by the control-freakery and tribalism of our present system. Victorian prime ministers would be scratching their heads in puzzlement.