All at sea?

Opposition by innuendo continues apace, with shadow chancellor George Osborne today picking up the baton briefly wielded by Liam Fox, to hint that he might cut three of Britain’s biggest defence projects, with a combined value of nearly £30 billion.

The axe, Osborne is suggesting, could fall within weeks of a Conservative administration being elected, and in his sights is £20 billion for the Eurofighter, £4 billion for the two Royal Navy aircraft carriers and £2.7 billion for the A-400M transport aircraft.

This, though, is highly tentative, as the shadow chancellor admits that he does not know what the "break clauses" in the contracts would involve, if the projects were scrapped.

In fact, the RAF as already acquired 55 Eurofighters, costing £3.8 billion and the rest of the order is widely thought to be tied in to stringent cancellation penalties which would negate any possible savings. Similarly, the MoD has already spent about £1 billion on early work on the two aircraft carriers, and there would doubtless be penalty clauses in place if work was abandoned.

Not mentioned though is the F-35 order, slated at approaching £10 billion. Presumably some would have to be cancelled if the aircraft carriers were ditched, although the RAF might want more aircraft to pick up on the capacity which would otherwise be delivered by the Navy.

As to the A-400Ms, the precise status of the commercial dealings between the government and Airbus is a closely-guarded secret, but even if the UK walked away from the project, it is not clear whether the £500 million already invested would be returned. Even if it was, cancellation would release very little money. The RAF desperately needs lift capacity and either or both C-130Js or C-17s would have to be bought to make up the shortfall.

Offering some possible flexibility, however, is BAE Systems which is offering a militarised version of its BAE 146 regional jetliner (pictured), with converted airframes available for the knock-down price of £3 million apiece.

BAE Systems at present owns some 47 of these aircraft, leased to regional airlines, but many of them are soon to be released as the airlines acquire new equipment. Conversion costs to military specification, including a cargo-carrying capability, are relatively modest.

Furthermore, the BAE 146 was designed for short-haul operations out of regional airports with tight noise restrictions, so it is capable of making steep climb-outs and descents, and can operate from short, unprepared airstrips with minimal modifications. This makes it optimal for military uses, albeit it can only carry half the load of a Hercules and it lacks a rear loading ramp.

However, acquisition of a number of these aircraft could be sufficient to ease the pressure on the current RAF fleet, especially if they were pooled with other coalition aircraft in Afghanistan, allowing C-130s from other nations to be used when needed, in return for BAE 146 capacity.

Innovative options such as these would seem to offer more scope for dealing with the current defence crisis. If not saving money in the longer-term, they enable cash flow to be managed, deferring major expenditure and flattening the peaks. Slowing down the Eurofighter production and stretching the F-35 programme – which has not in any event been finalised – while proceeding slowly on the carrier build – would have like effect.

Mr Osborne, therefore, has not necessarily sketched a path to salvation and, in fact, may be all at sea when it comes to cutting government spending. The need for a scalpel rather than an axe is indicated, but whether he has the skill to wield this precision tool has yet to be demonstrated.

COMMENT THREAD

There is no alternative

"We are confronted by a venture that is using anti-democratic means to establish an anti-democratic power structure, to no useful end for the people of these isles. Since this unwelcome revolution is being forced upon us, perhaps it is time to end the long taboo and ask whether we must inevitably go along with it."

That is from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, as part of the ongoing "debate" on the European Union in The Daily Telegraph.

His piece is juxtaposed with an article by Nicholas Fraser. He went to a midsummer crayfish party near Stockholm packed with the affluent, the good-looking and the politically correct. And he couldn't find anyone who didn't view British Euro-scepticism with reprobation. Then we get Stephen Wall who writes that "there is no viable alternative" to the EU – Britain has to make the best of it.

So there you are. If you want to find favour with the Scandinavian glitterati and you accept the view of Stephen Wall, then we should roll over and let this venture use anti-democratic means to establish an anti-democratic power structure, to no useful end for the people of these isles.

Actually, we don't get a choice – although Lord Tebbit has warned David Cameron that he must hold a referendum on the "European constitution" or risk losing voters to UKIP.

Tebbit charges that Cameron has backtracked on a pledge to hold a vote if, "as expected" the Irish vote "yes" because the constitution would already be in force by the time he came to into office.

I'm not so sure that the Irish are that ready to roll over, but it's difficult to read. The Tap blog detects signs that the rats are making preparations to desert the sinking ship, while the Telegraph is sending none too subtle signals to its Irish voters as to which way it thinks they should jump.

Those who are thinking of jumping UKIP's way will find that the desertion of the King Rat from the leadership – but not very much else – has opened up the prospect of a contest for his replacement between the Lord Pearson of Rannoch and a six-foot-four lesbian. Not much of a contest, some might say, except that Pearson is Farage's choice, which may give some UKIP members pause for thought.

Whoever wins, it is unlikely to make much difference to the vote at the general election. Tebbit might have fond illusions about UKIP sucking votes from the Europhile Cameron, but such is the head of steam building up against Brown that the bulk of voters will probably vote Tory for no other reason than to ditch an unpopular prime minister. On recent form, UKIP is unlikely to do well.

During the general election campaign, Mr Cameron and his euro-luvvies will do their best to keep "Europe" off the agenda – as always – which will leave UKIP gasping for the oxygen of publicity. Only perhaps the Irish can inject a bit of fire into the issue, and then only if they vote "no" in just over two weeks time. And which way they will jump is anyone's guess. There is no alternative but to wait and see.

COMMENT THREAD

Subject to some malfunction

The Daily Telegraph runs a lead item today (with a very similar piece in The Times), reporting that workers who fall ill during their holidays could now claim the time back from their employers.

Open Europe attributes the original story to People Management, but the Telegraph version says that this new situation follows "a landmark European Court of Justice judgement", although the report does not confirm that this is the case.

It is, we are told, an extrapolation from a judgement in favour of an employee who claimed that he should be able to shift his scheduled holiday because he had fallen ill just before he was due to go on leave, claiming sickness entitlement until he was fit enough to go on leave.

If the interpretation is correct, this means that the system can be abused, as the newspaper claims it can be. Someone actually on holiday, where self-certification is in force, can go down with a cold for a few days, or some such (or pretend to do so), and claim those days as sick leave, thus extending their holiday entitlement.

Experience, though, warns against taking anything a newspaper might say about an ECJ judgement at face value, without first reading the judgement on the court's website. Reference to the site, however, tells us that publication of case reports "... may be subject to some malfunction during the month of September." That prediction seems to have been accurate. There is no record of the case to which the newspaper refers.

But the ECJ is more accurate than it perhaps intended. If the Telegraph is even close to reporting the truth, there is indeed "some malfunction" ... in the whole system by which we are governed. On the face of it, the court is saying that sickness is a one-way bet. Leave entitlement only applies if you are healthy. If you are sick while on leave, the employer pays.

Maybe that is fair – maybe not. But it does add yet another burden on already hard-pressed employers. Such a decision, to impose yet more burdens, should be taken by our Parliament, after due consideration and debate. But these issues are no longer decided by our MPs. We have a supreme court in Luxembourg which tells us what we must do.

That is unacceptable. We all know it is unacceptable. But that is our system of government. And that is another reason why we must leave the EU.

COMMENT THREAD

Still true after all these years

A long rant about the battles that we are still fighting and have been doing so since the thirties on Your Freedom and Ours. Enjoy.

The antidote

The crap, the spotter, the antidote here and a commentary here - with another one here. Iain Dale picked it up, Devil's Kitchen takes them apart, Mr Eugenides adds a treasured comment and our Canadian and Portugese friends are on to it. Witterings from Witney gets it and even some less astute bloggers half get the point.

You wonder, though, whether the hacks begin to realise what complete fools they've made of themselves.

Obviously not, because the turd-eaters at The Daily Telegraph have just joined in (headline pictured above). I just knew they wouldn't be able to resist it, although none of their gifted hacks have been brave enough to put their names to their crap.

COMMENT THREAD

They know nothing ... they learn nothing

The increasingly dire Daily Telegraph today purports to offer us an in-depth assessment of the EU's "health and worth".

Written by Adrian Michaels, formerly the Financial Times' Milan correspondent, and now group foreign editor at the Telegraph Media Group, the tenor immediately becomes apparent from the reliance on quotes from the great eurohole, Timothy Garton Ash.

But the piece de resistance is the "timeline" giving the "history" of the EU. Following exactly the EU's own hagiography, it perpetuates the myth that the origins of the EU lie in the post-Second World War period – as opposed to the reality that the intellectual genesis stems from the wreckage of the First World War.

The distinction is vitally important as it explains how a very small group of people, including Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, constructed a paradigm to deal with the geopolitical structures of the 1920s, aimed at doing precisely what the politicians then failed to do – to prevent the Second World War.

That they failed did not deter them. After Nazi Germany had been defeated, they dusted off the same plans and applied them to a completely different geopolitical situation, as a means of preventing further war in between Germany and France – something which then (and now) was never going to happen.

It is that flawed (and failed) paradigm which now dominates European politics, and underlines the fatuity of the very essence of the European Union.

This, we explain in detail in The Great Deception, which we summarised on the blog, pointing out that the EU was already an idea whose time has gone.

But the likes of Adrian Michaels do not need to read books such as ours – they already know it all. And if they need to fill in any details, they can always call up Garton Ash to put them straight. These are the people who seek to keep us informed. The know nothing, they learn nothing. They are the enemy.

Pic: the first meeting of the European Coal and Steel Community Assembly – the fore-runner to the EU parliament. It was at this meeting that Monnet announced that they were setting up a "government of Europe". Nothing has changed since.

COMMENT THREAD

Turd Watch

The turd-eaters are in full flow this morning, trilling about "product placement" on the idiots' lantern.

One of many consuming the fare is Jo Adetunji of The Guardian, who follows the "corporate line", under the headline "UK to follow US lead by allowing product placement on television."

Fresh from successes such as these, our little hackette breathlessly tells us that, "while product placement is rife in film, British television programmes have long had to make up fictional products." But, she writes, "That is all likely to change this week after a decision that is expected to allow commercial broadcasters to show sponsored products for the first time."

And why is that "all likely to change"? Well, according to this turd-eater, it is because culture secretary Ben Bradshaw is to announce a three-month consultation on the changes in a Royal Television Society speech this week.

Despite, in March, the then culture secretary, Andy Burnham, saying that lifting the ban raised "very serious concerns" and was "blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial", Bradshaw avers – according to la Adetnji - that the "climate has changed" and has accepted lifting the ban "in principle".

That "climate", of course, is the EU's Directive 2007/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2007 amending Council Directive 89/552/EC on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the pursuit of television broadcasting activities.

This is now known as the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, updating the 1997 "Television without Frontiers" directive, not that you would expect an airhead like Adetunji to realise this.

Nor indeed do the other turd-eaters, crunching on the same set of press releases, not least Jason Beattie of the Daily Mirror who reports under the headline: "Product placement could mean £100m windfall for TV". This feeble hack cites (as do many) Richard Lindley, chairman of the independent Voice of the Listener and Viewer, who moans that product placement it would "contaminate" TV and inevitably lead to placements on news and current affairs programmes.

No it will not, Mr Lindley, because the rules are made by the EU and specifically prohibit "placements on news and current affairs programmes", which actually makes the comment not worth printing. But nothing is too bad, too irrelevant or too misleading for our idle hacks to print, if it fills a space.

Actually, while product placement is permitted by the new directive, it is not compulsory – in theory. On the face of it, member states are "allowed" to make a choice.

That is the theory, but with broadcasters such as BskyB beaming their trash from Luxembourg, taking advantage of EU law, domestic broadcasters such as ITV would be heavily disadvantaged if the UK decided to go it alone. Thus, the UK government would very quickly find itself in the ECJ, defending an expensive law suit. Thus, it really has not option but to accede to the change in the "climate".

Not to be outdone though, in the Financial Times, it takes two hacks, Tim Bradshaw and Jim Pickard, to chew on the turd, telling us that: "Television advertisements are set to escape the confines of the commercial break as the government reverses its opposition to product placement." There is no mention of the EU, of course.

Nor will you get that from turd-eater Peter Taylor in The Daily Telegraph who, like the rest of the diners, solemnly informs us that: "Troubled ITV stands to reap tens of millions of pounds in new revenue under Government plans to allow US-style product placement on television."

The nearest we get to any recognition of the elephant in the room is from Suzy Jagger and Patrick Foster in The Times, and pair who feel the need to hold hands while they munch. They boldly pronounce that, "There's a time and a placement for everything as TV aims to cash in." You have to go way down in the heap of excrement offered to find the reference to "A European Parliament directive" (whatever that is) that "came into force almost two years ago". It, we are told, "permits product placement in sport and light entertainment programmes, if national governments allowed it. Most other EU nations have decided to lift restrictions."

And that's it. The BBC ran the story on its broadcast news yesterday, with nary a mention of the EU, and all the other little turd-eaters have piled in with the same line. One might suggest they are all up their own northeast passage.

COMMENT THREAD

The pictures tell the story

SEE also update here.


We were not going to return immediately to the "Northeast passage" but the temptation proved too great when we found the photograph shown above. It depicts an SA-15 type multipurpose icebreaking cargo ship of the Norilsk class. Nineteen were built for the Soviet Union between 1982-1987 at Finnish shipyards Wärtsilä and Valmet.

The significance of the picture is that it was taken in 1984 when the 20,000-dwt ship made the first of several shipments of pipes from Japan to the Ob' estuary via the "impossible" Northeast passage. It was following exactly the same route, to exactly the same destination as the much-lauded Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight. Furthermore, the ship made the journey without an icebreaker escort.

From the same source, we also learn that ships plying this route have been visiting Vancouver since 1979.

In 1986 three made homeward passages with grain after the end of the normal navigation season. The last cleared Vancouver on 12 November, and with minimum assistance reached Arkhangelsk on 2 December. Grain shipments from Vancouver to Arctic ports were continuing up to 1992, when the Ivan Bogin cleared Vancouver on 27 August 1992 for Murmansk.

As to European ships making the passage, the Germans have been there before, beating the Beluga fleet by nearly 70 years. This they did with the 3,287-ton converted merchantman Komet.

She left Germany on 3 July 1940 with a crew of 270, sailed up the Norwegian coast and then, with the assistance of the Soviets, navigated the northern route, crossing the Bering Straits into the Pacific Ocean in early September. She returned safely to Germany on 30 November 1941, after sinking seven ships.

During the war US-built lend-lease vessels, including liberty ships handed over to the Soviets, made 120 voyages with cargoes from the American west coast via the Bering Strait to northern ports, following routes similar to that followed by the Beluga fleet. Navigation by Soviet vessels continued after the war but, in the early stages of the Cold War, the route was closed to Western vessels – not by ice but by politics.

The first offer to open the Northern Sea Route to international shipping was made early in 1967, when it was argued that it could save thirteen days between Hamburg and Yokohama as opposed to the conventional link via Suez. To demonstrate the viability of the route, Soviet cargo carriers made three demonstration voyages from north European ports and Japan.

That the project went no further again was nothing to do with ice. In 1967, after the Six Day War, the Suez Canal was closed. The Soviets did not wish to offend friendly Arab governments – and particularly Egypt - by offering an alternative to the Suez Canal and the invitation for international shipping on the NSR was quietly withdrawn.


Twenty years later, the USSR was shifting its economic enterprises to a self-financing system. In 1989 shipments between western Europe and Japan were made in the new generation of SA-15 freighters, one on charter to a German firm.

The following year space was offered to foreign shippers in eight SA-15s trading between Europe and Japan via the Arctic. In 1991 there were fifteen such voyages with 210,000 tons of cargo (one pictured above). That year, the Northern Sea Route was again declared open to foreign shipping.

To test the route, the French Arctic supply vessel "L'Astrolabe" left Le Havre on 27 July 1991 and successfully navigated the NRS, arriving in Japan in early September.

Yet another European vessel followed in her wake. In the summer of 1997, the Finnish-flag tanker Uikku (pictured, below right) sailed the length of the NSR. beginning in Murmansk 3 September, and discharged fuel along a number of Russian Arctic ports. It arrived in Pevek on the 12th to discharge fuel and then sailed through the Bering Strait on 15 September.

After picking up more fuel in the Pacific the ship sailed back along the NSR. discharging fuel at several ports and reaching Murmansk on 14 October. It was reported by the Russian NSR authorities that a Latvian-flag tanker also completed a full transit of the NSR in 1997.

And yet The Independent has the nerve to claim that, "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage," while The Times in an updated version of its story, is still telling us that "the voyage was considered impossible until a few years ago."

As for Niels Stolberg, founder and president of the Beluga Group, when he tells us that, "We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company to have successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage," why is the media taking him seriously?

COMMENT THREAD

The turd eaters

You see the dynamic all the time. One newspaper (or broadcaster) runs a story and, within hours, the rest of the media pick it up and repeat it, sometimes with their own spin, but with the basic facts unchecked. Thus, a core error gets repeated and repeated until it becomes part of the narrative, pulled out for ever more whenever the issue is raised, becoming part of the received wisdom, simply by dint of constant repetition.

Discussing with one senior official a particularly egregious example of an error-ridden story which had spread through the system, in frustration he described the process as akin to journalists eating each others' turds.

Graphic though that image might be, it is uncannily accurate. You see it in any newsroom, where the assembled hacks have televisions tuned to all the main news channels, they have their competitors' products on their desks, and their websites on screen, each imbibing and re-excreting the droppings of each other, in a constant, self-perpetuating cycle.

There is an added dimension in the Westminster bubble, where the politicians pick up the choicest turds and produce their own, which are seized upon by the ravening hoards of political hacks, to reinforce the cycle.

A classic example of the general dynamic comes with the Independent's story of the sailing the "Northeast passage". This has now been picked up by The Times and the Mail. Both repeat the elements of the story but the latter, in classic tabloid style, "adds a Union Jack" to it – on the assumption that the matter is of no interest to its readers unless there is a British dimension.

Thus we get: "Melting ice cap opens up Northeast Passage to British ships", the lead paragraph telling us that: "The price of British imports from Asia could fall after two merchant ships completed an historic shortcut over the once ice-bound top of the world."

Having planted the flag, the paper then goes on to re-excrete the Independent's droppings, asserting that, "They [the merchant ships] are the first commercial vessels to successfully travel between Asia and Europe using the Northeast Passage and the shipping lane could become a viable alternative to the established Suez Canal route during a six to eight-week window every summer."

Amusingly, not once in its piece does the Mail mention that the ships which completed the "historic shortcut" were German. Although the paper is happy to deliver its own variety of turds, its editors presumably judged that this particular bit of information was too strong for its readers' stomachs.

Nevertheless, the paper repeats without question the shipping company's claim – as retailed by The Independent - that it had saved £180,000 per vessel by using the route to sail from South Korea to Rotterdam. We are faithfully told that: "It is 3,500 miles and ten days shorter than the established 12,500-mile merchant ship journey, which goes through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean."

This is something I should have picked up in my critique of the Independent piece, as the claim is total garbage. The clue is actually in the piece, but I missed it on first reading. What we are told, in just one sentence, is: "The 12,000-tonne vessels' summer journey through the Northeast Passage was carried out with 3,500 tonnes of construction materials and parts for a Siberian power station on board."

You have to go to the shipping company's website to flesh out this detail, where one finds that the destination of the ships was Siberia. It was delivering heavy components of a power plant to the Russian Novyy Port (see map) which serves the settlement of Yamburg in Obskaya Guba (Ob' Bay), where the shipment was to be delivered by barge to the mouth of the River Ob.

This begins to explain everything. The two ships involved, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, are heavy lift freighters, with special 250-ton cranes on board which enable them to deliver very heavy cargoes to sites which do not have developed dock facilities. Their task was to deliver a total of "44 cargo modules with single weights of 200 tons and above". (Sister ship, Beluga Family, illustrated - showing the unloading process.)

This does not stop turd-eater Tony Halpin, of The Times describing them as "two German container ships" and then referring to the "heavy merchant vessel Fraternity", unable - it seems - to understand the difference between "heavy" and "heavy lift". At 12,000 tons, heavy it ain't.

Nevertheless, since the whole purpose of the ships' journey was to deliver cargo to this Siberian town, it defies imagination as to how the owners were actually saving money, compared with taking a different route. They took that route because they were obliged to take it. There was no realistic alternative. And as the ships required not one, but two icebreaker escorts – as we now learn – it is extremely hard to see how the route could save any money at all for normal commercial traffic.

Turning to the Mail's assertion that, "The price of British imports from Asia could fall ... ", this is yet another fantasy. The massive container ships which ply the southern routes would not be suitable for the northern route, not least because the deep draughts would drastically limit their navigational flexibility in the shallows of the Kara and Laptev Seas, and the straits which shipping is forced to use.

More particularly though, there is the issue of punctuality. Dock facilities for container ships have to be booked well in advance. Loading and unloading is scheduled incredibly tightly, with massive financial penalties for delays.

With transit through the northern route determined by ice conditions and weather, it would not be possible to estimate passage duration even to within a few days. Thus, the costs of being forced to use smaller, less economic ships, the uncertainties in passage time, the cost of icebreaker escorts and the slower speed of transit (compared with the 25 knots of ocean-going ships) would far outweigh the savings accrued from the shorter route length.

In short, the Mail story is garbage, a turd amongst turds, churned out by the never-ending legions of witless hacks whose sole purpose in life is to fill space, heedless of quality or accuracy of content.

The point, of course, is that in this particular story, the fact-checking is relatively easy and the errors very obvious. In other stories, the errors are equally grave but less obvious and much harder to check. But an industry which is capable of producing the low-grade material that we have just seen is capable of anything. Nothing, but nothing, should be trusted. Just because journalists produce turds does not mean we have to eat them.

COMMENT THREAD

The bigger picture

The claque of foreign correspondent rallying to the support of Stephen Farrell over his kidnap and rescue in Afghanistan are fulsome in their praise of him – and each other. Many of them have written books displaying their prowess all with the benefit of "being there", offering their pearls of wisdom and expertise.

To a man (and woman) though, they all seem to make a mistake common to purveyors of their trade. As journalists, they share the belief that grasp of a tiny piece of the story – seen from their own limited perspectives – necessarily qualify them to hold forth on the bigger picture, and to draw conclusions from them.

What they are doing, most often, is confusing the process of reporting – writing up a coherent story on the basis of facts they have gathered – with analysis: gathering facts from diverse sources, assessing their relative merits and reliability, assembling them and, drawing conclusions and, where possible, extrapolating possible outcomes.

Although the processes seem similar, they are not. Reporters usually come to the story with a pre-conceived notion of what they want to write, and then collect "facts" to stand up the story and to illustrate it. The narrative is invariably worked out in advance.

The analyst, however, comes from the opposite direction. When the process is done properly, there is neither narrative nor a pre-conceived idea. Instead, the facts are collected, sifted, weighed up, assembled and reviewed, from which the narrative emerges. As its best, it is a journey of discovery, with the conclusions sometimes coming as a surprise, even to their authors.

The often unrecognised difference leads to some of the underlying tensions between the "claque" who claim greater authority from their experiences of "being there" - even if they so often can only claim to have seen a small snapshot and very often do not understand the importance of what they have seen, or how it fits into the bigger picture – and the more distant observers who have a wider range of data with which to work and benefit from the detachment that only time and distance can bring.

In some respects, "being there" is a handicap to an analyst. The impressions and power of individual events overwhelm the observers, distorting their perceptions and obscuring less prominent issues that may, in fact, have greater importance. And even then, no one can "be there" in the sense that they are everywhere. They may be in the country but many events happen at a different place and time, when the "on-the-spot" observer can be tens or even hundreds of miles away.

All this serves as a weighty prelude to today's lead item in the Booker column, where Booker – without having left his study in Somerset - can pronounce with authority on events in distant Afghanistan and conclude that our intervention there is doomed.

To come to that conclusion, Booker has assembled diverse sources of information – almost none of which have been gleaned from the UK claque of foreign correspondents. These serve to illustrate a theme we have rehearsed on the blog and DOTR – that the Taleban derive much of their funding not from the oft-quoted sources, but from British and other Western taxpayers. And not only are we in large part paying for the Taleban to kill our troops, our aid programme even supplies much of the material used to make the explosives used to kill them.

A little vignette of this system, writes Booker, is the sad story of the Kajaki dam in northern Helmand. A year ago the MoD was crowing over the success of British troops in ensuring the safe delivery of a new US turbine to this Russian-built hydro-electric power station.

More than 2,000 troops were involved in the operation, and we still guard the plant as it generates its pitifully small amount of electricity (16 megawatts). But – and this we learnt from Michael Yon and other sources (even the reviled Associated Press) - the power lines and sub-stations which feed it to several towns are controlled by the Taleban, who then charge money to customers for allowing the juice to reach them.

This has been discussed and analysed on diverse blogs but, while the MSM has offered derring-do accounts of operations in the Kajaki area, none of our ranks of gifted correspondents have seen fit to highlight what is in fact a major scandal.

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal. Embattled British troops, in a scarcely defensible outpost in Kajaki, are fighting and dying to protect an asset which provides financial resources to the enemy they are fighting.

That alone, though, is but one strand of the "bigger picture" that Booker examines. A far larger source of Taleban income, he writes, are the protection rackets by which they siphon off a significant part of the billions of dollars we and other Western countries pour into Afghanistan to keep troops supplied and to provide new infrastructure, such as schools and roads, under a multiplicity of aid programmes.

Much of the thousands of tons of supplies needed each month by our forces, for instance, is trucked up from Pakistan by private firms contracted to the MoD. But the price we pay is inflated by as much as 20 percent to include protection money paid by contractors to the Taleban to ensure that convoys are not attacked en route.

This has been rehearsed by local sources, not least here, with sums mentioned of up to £350 for each supply truck, to allow safe passage.

Although occasionally mentioned in passing by our ranks of gifted correspondents, none have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal.

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal. In order to supply British troops, at the end of a long and fragile logistics train, the British government is paying huge sums to the enemy which our troops are fighting, just so that they will allow through the supplies which our troops need to survive.

Then, from the US Time magazine, Booker picks up the detail of how reconstruction money is skimmed off to pay the Taleban not to destroy projects, thus funding the bombs and weapons that are used to kill British troops. He quotes Maj-Gen Michael Flynn, a senior intelligence officer with ISAF, saying there is now "more money going into the pockets of local leaders (of the insurgency) from [these] criminal activities than there is from narcotics".

And while this information was freely published in a US magazine, of our ranks of gifted correspondents, none have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal. And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal.

Then Booker picks up the fact that US and UK aid agencies are supplying thousands of tons of free fertiliser to Afghan famers, the very material which the Taleban are using to make bombs with which to kill British soldiers. Yet this information comes not from our ranks of gifted correspondents, none of whom have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal.

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal, that British and US taxpayers are subsidising the materials used by the Taleban to kill and maim our troops.

Furthermore, having not reported any of the items in isolation – with any degree of emphasis (or at all) – none of our ranks of gifted correspondents have put these disparate issues together – the essence of analysis. But, if you do, we find that the Taleban is drawing healthy amounts of finance from electricity, from our supply chain and from the reconstruction programme, topped up with free supplies of material that they can use for their bombs.

But it does not stop there. Much has been made of the opium control programme but Booker picks up on the scarce-reported fact that the price (and availability) of opium is linked to the price of wheat. When the price of wheat is high, opium production falls off, which means that British interests are best served by keeping the price of wheat high.

But, with an unerring instinct for doing the wrong things, our government is using our money to give free wheat seed to Afghan farmers, the effect of which will be to drive down the price of wheat and thus increase opium production.

The one consolation – and it is a poor one – is that this makes very little difference to the finances of local insurgents (although the high-level Taleban do benefit). They levy "taxes" on whatever crops the farmers grow, whether it is wheat or opium – a process facilitated by the British Army which spends so much of its time and resource on aimless patrolling and next to no resource on targeting the extortion rackets.

Putting all that together is part of the process of analysis. You don't have to "be there", to do it – and its is interesting that none of those brilliant reporters who have so famously been there, and thus pronounce their superiority, have thought to do this simple exercise.

Yet it is the analysis which allows the conclusions, and which gives them their authority. Finance is the lifeblood of any insurgency and, to crack it, you have to deal with the source. Further, there are few better ways of winning the "hearts and minds" of the local population than to bear down on extortion rackets. On the other hand, failure to do so will weaken any counter-insurgency effort.

Thus, as long as the British and other western taxpayers are being forced to subsidise the Taleban to kill and maim British soldiers, and supply them the materials to make their bombs, and then to undermine the opium control programme, our intervention in Afghanistan is indeed doomed. And the more money we throw at the problem, the worse it will get.

It would thus be so refreshing if our journalistic claque could crawl out of their comfort zone and look at the bigger picture. They need to stop bleating about needing "more resources" in Afghanistan. We are already giving the Taleban far too much money. We should not be agitating to give them more.

COMMENT THREAD

A triumph for propaganda

Front page of The Independent today proclaims: "A triumph for man, a disaster for mankind", heralding the completion of what it claims to be "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage."

"It is an epic moment," says the paper, "but also a vivid sign of climate change in the Arctic." The picture caption reinforces the point, telling us: "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage, a fabled Arctic Sea route that links the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific far more directly than the usual southerly cargo route."

And none of this is true. It could not be further from the truth – it is a complete and utter distortion, a fabrication, a lie. An Englishman's Castle sussed it, by the simple expedient of looking up Wikipedia

But there is much, much more to it than that. Writes Independent hack Tony Paterson, in Berlin, "It has been one of the elusive goals of seafaring nations almost since the beginnings of waterborne trade, but for nearly 500 years the idea has been dismissed as an impossible dream. Now, as a result of global warming, the dream is about to come true."

For the truth (Wikipedia apart), let us see what the Russians say about this "impossible dream". More correctly known as the Northern Sea Route (NSR), they tell us that the NSR is Russia's main national transport line in the Arctic.

It has been commercially exploited since 1935 when four cargo motor ships passed through the route during a single navigation season. In 1936, warships of the Baltic Fleet successfully arrived in the Far East. Russia, we are told, has invested enormous material and human resources in exploring and equipping this route. Powerful icebreakers and icebreaking cargo ships have been constructed, navigational and hydrometeorological systems established. And furthermore, up until the end of the 80s, the Arctic transportation system was self-supporting. The volume of sea traffic reached 7 million tons in 1987.

The record tells us that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union - for reasons entirely related to ice conditions and entirely to do with the breakdown of the route infrastructure - shipping along the route diminished but, we learn, between 1993 - 1997 the volume of sea cargo along the NSR was still 150 - 200 thousand tons a year. A new post-Soviet peak was established in 1993 when 15 Russian ships with 210 thousand tons of transit goods passed along the route. Now, there are even tourist trips.

Also, eight ships carrying metals, fertilizers and timber travelled from ports in Russia, Latvia, Sweden and Finland to China, Japan, and Thailand. Seven ships from China carried oilcake, bauxite, magnetite and other operating supplies to Holland, England, Ireland, Germany, and Spain.

So, how did the newspaper and its fellow travellers, such as the BBC, get it so wrong?

For the genesis of error, we need to look to the hype at the start of this "epic moment", which involved two German-owned vessels, Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight (pictured). Amongst the first conveying the misinformation was this, at the end of July, telling us that the the transit of these ships would be "the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage."

In August, though, Reuters was more circumspect, although it did lay the beginnings of the false trail, announcing: "Climate change opens Arctic route for German ships."

"The melting of Arctic ice as a result of climate change has made it possible to send Beluga's multi-purpose heavy lift ships along the legendary Northeast Passage," we were informed, the agency citing as its source the chief executive of the Beluga Group, Niels Stolberg.

Now, Stolberg is something of a devotee of the climate change religion, not least because he is at the forefront of fuel-saving developments, pioneered in the name of saving the planet. One of those is the "Sky Sail" – an enormous "kite-like sail" that was recently fitted to one of Stolberg's ships, funded, one discovers by the EU as part of its "Life" programme on climate change, to the tune of €1.2 million.

Enthusiast for the new religion he might be, even Stolberg back in August did not make the bold claims that are being made now. He told Reuters that this was the first "non-Russian commercial vessel" cleared by the Russians through the route. That much was possibly true, but – as we know – there had over the years been substantial Russian commercial traffic. Thus did Reuters talk about German ships. In other words, this was a "first", but only for German, as opposed to Russian ships.

By today, however, this has morphed into the Independent legend, that, "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage ... Explorers throughout history have tried, and failed; some have died in the attempt," it warbles.

In support of this fantasy, both the Independent and the BBC cite the 1553 expedition by Sir Hugh Willoughby, who died attempting to find the route. But neither of them tells us that the route was successfully navigated in 1879 by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld who took his ship, the SS Vega, all the way through the passage from Europe to the Bering Strait.

As to the current ice conditions which allowed the Beluga ships transit, the National Snow and Ice Data Center gives the overview: It tells us:

Sea ice extent averaged over the month of August 2009 was 6.26 million square kilometers (2.42 million square miles). This is 900,000 square kilometers (350,000 square miles) above the record low for the month, which occurred in August 2007, 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) above August 2008, and just below the August 2005 value of 6.30 million square kilometers (2.43 million square miles). Arctic sea ice extent for August 2009 was 1.41 million square kilometers (540,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

And conditions, it seems, were marginal. The two Beluga vessels had to be accompanied by at least one Russian nuclear ice-breaker during the whole of the trip. The two ships "encountered snow, fog, ice floes, and treacherous icebergs which showed only about one meter of their huge underwater volume on the sea's surface." Passing the northernmost point, the Vilkizi Strait on the tip of Siberia, half of the sea's surface was covered with pack ice and the captains of both vessels had to call Russian ice pilots on board to shepherd them through.

Nevertheless, the story is just what the warmists wanted. Says Melanie Duchin, Arctic Expedition leader on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, "This is further proof that climate change is happening now." Predictably, she then adds that the development put greater pressure on world leaders to agree a major emissions cut at their Copenhagen meeting in December. "This is not a cause for celebration but cause for immediate action," she declared.

Interestingly, the BBC is now downplaying the hype, referring only to "German ships", and admitting that the route has been "passable without ice breakers in 2005", neglecting to tell us that this journey required substantial assistance from ice breakers. So much for global warming.

Not from The Independent though are we allowed to know the truth. Its editorial proclaims that, "One hundred years ago, the news of a ship successfully traversing the treacherous North-east Passage would have prompted popular celebrations and wild enthusiasm." Yet, despite the feat of the Vega in 1879, this is now "a confirmation of just how rapidly and dangerously our climate is changing."

There are lies, damn lies, and then there is The Independent.

COMMENT THREAD

On not playing nicely with other children

It is the perennial cry of all parents to their recalcitrant children: why can't you play nicely with other children. I, too, heard it in my childhood but not nearly as often as I do now. Either I was a nicer child than adult or, much more likely, my parents were far too sensible to keep saying something as patently silly as that. The disadvantage of having had intelligent parents is that nobody quite lives up to that in later life. Ah well!

The problem with playing nicely with other children is that they might not be playing games you want to get involved in or, even more importantly, they might not be playing according to the rules you know or the ones you have all agreed on.

All this is a preliminary to an elaboration of my posting about the Taxpayers' Alliance yesterday. As ever, it has caused a certain amount of harrumping, though not on the part of the TPA. They don't read this blog, knowing full well that only some children need to be played with nicely.

First of all, I should point out that it is unfair to blame the Boss for that posting. It was not his, though he did not disagree with the gist of it. His style of writing is very different from mine as anyone who reads the blog and not the forum knows.

Secondly, I am just a little tired (and so is the Boss) of being lectured about the need to work with all allies whatever their hue is and to stop breaking up the eurosceptic alliance.

With respect, we have been in this game long enough to know which children are worth playing with and which are going to change the rules as soon as they have been agreed.

Point number one: not every organization that calls itself eurosceptic is that, even though the BBC appears to believe that the Conservative Party, as led by the Boy-King, is frighteningly eurosceptic. It is not. And neither are its various front organizations such as Open Europe or the Taxpayers' Alliance.

Point number two is that it is very hard to define what eurosceptic means to various people and organizations. Therefore, it makes precious little sense to insist that all those who call themselves that are fighting for the same cause. How do I know what half these people are fighting for? They say they want to see a reformed EU or a different relationship between the UK and other members or a democratic EU.

In all fairness, I have to believe that they mean that bilge. I know that it is bilge because I have actually read the treaties and various agreements and they tell me that none of that is achievable. Therefore, fighting for it is not only a waste of time but a pernicious waste of time as it takes away attention from the fight we should be engaging in.

Following on from there, one has to admit that people who engage in this pernicious waste of time are making it very hard for real eurosceptics to start working on what really matters: how do we break up this nasty corrupt organization and what do we do afterwards.

By making this hard they are, in fact, playing into the hands of the enemy who are delighted to see eurosceptic money, time and effort going into fruitless discussions about possible reform or formation of different links. They can use that time to push through even more nasty legislation that cannot be reversed. Ergo, people who make that possible for our enemies are not really our allies or anywhere near being our friends. QED, as we used to say in my youth when geometry was still taught in schools.

Take the TPA's campaign to tell people how much money we are wasting on the EU, how corrupt its servants are and how expensive and harmful the CAP and CFP are. Very useful to bring it to people's attention, of course. The only problem is that the expense and corruption of the EU are the only things that have been well known and completely accepted by most people in this country, even by those who see nothing wrong with the project.

The problem lies in trying to explain other aspects of our membership of the EU and how we can change the situation though, one must admit, a surprising number of people outside the charmed political circle have grasped the basic point: it does not matter who we vote for as they do not decide on anything for this country.

So why do these people keep treading water? Part of it is a reluctance to find out what has gone on before they came on the scene and decided to own the subject. I have, I believe, mentioned this before in connection with various organizations.

There is, however, a more serious problem and it is why these children are not really that much fun to play with. Their idea of what the game should be about is different from ours. By keeping the discussion on the expense – a necessary but not sole part of it – they prevent any movement forward, which, if it happened, would show up their own and the Conservative Party's credentials as eurosceptics.

By focusing on the expense they can imply that there is a possibility of change and reform (or even hope and change) if only people vote Conservative. This did not quite work in the European elections but might in the General. Then, of course, we shall find that nothing much has changed and the Conservatives are no more able to solve the problems than Labour. But it will be too late: we shall have lost more precious time, fossicking with unimportant issues that are being foisted on the political discourse by those faux eurosceptics we are told to ally ourselves with.

So you see, I do not want to play nicely with those other children because they are not playing the game we agreed to play. They are very nice children and we shall all get on very well when we sit down to have our jelly and ice cream but we shall never play the same game or agree on the rules.

COMMENT THREAD

Silence not an option

The Times is putting out a story this morning that the Conservative leadership is "backtracking on spending commitments for Britain's Armed Forces and could yet shelve plans to replace Trident."

The trouble with these sort of stories – this one by Tom Baldwin – is that you really do not know whether this is for real, or whether this is the Tory party testing the water in order to gauge public reaction.

What is becoming very clear is that the Tories are all over the place when it comes to defence. Only last year – and for some time before that – Liam Fox was pledging that the three main "big ticket" defence projects would be carried over. These were the Trident programme, the navy's carriers and the army's FRES programme. And then there was talk of increasing the size of the army.

Although commonly cited as costing £5 billion, the carrier programme is more like £20 billion if you include the aircraft and infrastructure costs. This with FRES at £16 billion and Trident puts the commitment close to £60 billion, tying up the procurement budget for many years to come.

Now, it seems, the Tory hierarchy are not quite so sure, and – we are told – are relying of their commitment to a strategic defence review (SDR) to hold off having to make any firm commitments. But then, if the Party is really testing the water, and the public reaction to any cutbacks is hostile, they have a problem.

The "big ticket" programmes, for all their eye-watering costs, are only part of the equation. The accumulation of small and medium projects – not least the MARS replenishment fleet replacement for the navy, the A400M air transports for the RAF and the Future Lynx programme for the army all add up to a tidy penny.

Then there remains more than a little strategic confusion. Fox, in a recent speech was anxious to talk up the Russian threat, with reminders of that country's "re-armament" programme.

This threat, we have considered to be somewhat overstated, especially when Putin had to call on elite troops from the Moscow region to overpower Georgia last year. And a recent report on the state of Russian defence industries lends credence to the view that the Bear is no longer a significant conventional military threat.

That Fox seems to feel the need to talk it up suggests that he is listening very closely to the UK defence industry, which would much prefer spending on conventional capabilities to deal with inter-state wars, rather than see the focus on counter-insurgency, from which there are lean pickings for domestic producers. But then, with Charles Guthrie advising the Tory team, this is only to be expected.

The Tories could, of course, put the speculation to bed by declaring their hand now – making it clear that the UK can no longer afford to finance a military capable of autonomous action in a high-intensity inter-state war. This, though, would need a further declaration of where Britain sees itself in future conflicts, how it would manage its alliances and what precise capabilities it deems essential.

These grown-up questions, however, demand a level of clarity and – to an extent – political courage, which has not yet been apparent from the Tory opposition. And while deferring decisions until after the election may seem an easy way out, events seem to be forcing the pace.

And then, of course, there is the Irish referendum on the horizon. If the Irish fail to deliver a "no" vote and the "colleagues" gets their treaty ratified, the EU military ambitions will climb higher up the political agenda – with profound spending implications.

Having made a meal of attacking Labour on its defence credentials, the electorate may be in the mood to demand something a little more substantive from the Tories than the fare on offer, especially if there is an undeclared agenda to cut spending or, even worse, an intention to buy in to the EU's martial ambitions.

Silence on these issues would appear no longer to be a credible option.

COMMENT THREAD

Rising from the dead

One would have thought that Declan Ganley, after his drubbing in the euro-elections, might stay in his little hole – especially as we heard that he was to quit politics.

The ego will always out, though, and the great man has now re-emerged to take command of the second Irish referendum, giving the Wall Street Journal the benefit of his pearls of wisdom.

For a man who chose a former MoD publicity officer as the leader of his election campaign, and who offered a platform where to describe it as "incoherent" would be an undeserved compliment, to have him on the "no" side is something of a mixed blessing.

The chances are, though, that he has picked the winning side, as sentiment hardens against the “colleagues” and the Irish people realise they are being taken for fools – and have the fortune to have the opportunity to deliver the shamrock version of a Bronx cheer to their masters.

If the Irish people prevail, it will most likely be in spite of rather than because of Ganley's efforts, this dim little man still prattling about being a "committed European." He is not a eurosceptic, not in any way, shape or form, he tells us, chirping that he believes, "that Europe's future as united is the only sensible way forward."

While saddled with Ganley, however, the "no" campaign is able to benefit from the increasingly crass hand being played by the Irish government, which is relying on a procession of visiting commissioners in an attempt to sweet-talk the Irish into believing that the EU can turn water into wine.

If the Irish do fall for this blarney, we will have to revisit all those Irish jokes but, on the face of it, the only jokes currently in town are the Irish government and Ganley.

COMMENT THREAD

You can fool most of the people ...

The torrent of propaganda pouring from the media on "climate change" is having its effect. A survey from Cardiff University shows that, compared with six years ago, the "hard-line" core of people who do not accept that human activity has had any impact on global warming remains fixed at about 20 percent.

Although the sample was relatively small and geographically limited, questioning 551 people of all ages and backgrounds from Norfolk and Hampshire, there is some small comfort that 29 percent of those questioned thought the evidence on global warming had been exaggerated – double the number who held the same opinion in 2003.

Many others also thought the evidence linking human activity and global warming was "unreliable" or "conflicting". Furthermore, 39 percent "thought leading experts still questioned the causes of climate change" and 33 percent thought there was too much conflicting evidence.

But only 25 percent thought evidence for climate change was unreliable; only 23 percent thought climate change was due to natural temperature fluctuations and, amazingly, only five percent thought the media were too alarmist.

It is that last statistic that is most worrying. Any rational overview of its output would quickly affirm that the media is one of the prime generators of climate alarmism. But then we are dealing with a population where, as a recent poll showed, 77 percent were proud of the BBC.

However sophisticated people might think they are, their opinions and what passes for thinking are still heavily shaped by the media. Despite the cornucopia of information from the internet, where original sources can be found and the error-strewn MSM can be challenged, the bulk of people imbibe the pap they are fed, and largely believe it.

Not for nothing is the United Nations seeking to enlist the global media "in order to build momentum towards the critical climate change negotiations" at the Copenhagen this December.

By all past evidence, their money will be well spent. As a certain man once said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." What he didn't realise is that, even in a free society, people will keep believing it, even when evidence to the contrary is freely available. People believe what they want to believe, but mostly because they do not care enough to want to dispute it, or because that is what they are told to believe and they are unable to think for themselves.

And that is how these thieves manage to rob us blind.

COMMENT THREAD

It's all over bar the shouting

No, not the war in Afghanistan. I refer to the eurosceptic fight. We have won, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. How do I know this? Well, I have been given a copy of The Taxpayers' Alliance's 08/09 Review and it is quite clear to me that they have achieved all that the rest of us have been working for all these years.

What's that? You are asking what it is they have achieved? Really, how can you be so cynical? They have had campaigns against the EU Rip-Off, produced a possible ad that tells everyone who is not completely asleep that the EU costs us a lot of money and have worn t-shirts against the Common Fisheries Policy. As readers may recall, I mentioned the demonstration at the time.

Anyway, the Review is very glossy with lots of pictures and two pages devoted to the European Union, which comes in the section Policy Influence. This must mean that somehow, somewhere they have influenced somebodies policy on the EU. So there you are, I told you we have won.

What do you mean, there have been no changes in anybody's policy with regards to the EU? I fail to see what that has to do with anything. After all, they quote Tim Montgomerie, who, apparently said, possibly after a very good dinner, that

The Taxpayers' Alliance is more likely to deliver Eurosceptic change than UKIP.

It is, perhaps, as well that Mr Montgomerie, who is, himself a member of Better Off Out, did not specify what those eurosceptic changes might be. For the TPA tends to finish all its reports, which are always the first ever on the subject, with suggestions of what the EU should do to reform itself. No suggestions on formation of Porcine Air Force but, I am sure, that is only a matter of time.

Anyhow, the section concludes with the following encouraging paragraph:

The EU campaign continues apace. We are already rallying support in the City against the EU's proposed financial directives, which seriously endanger the hedge fund industry. Later in the year we will publish an exciting short book, exploring the opportunities for Britain in a new relationship with our fellow European countries.

Let us not worry about the curious grammatical and syntactic structure. Let us look at content only.

Of course, the problem of the financial directives (part of a ten-year programme for the consolidation of the finance industry within the EU) has never been raised by anybody, not on this blog, not in the House of Lords, not at Bruges Group meetings, not in the City itself. How thankful we are that the TPA has come along and started campaigning.

Above all, we are looking forward to their ideas of how those "opportunities in a new relationship with our fellow European countries" are to be achieved. Exactly what methods of change will the boys and girls at the TPA be proposing. Can't wait for the exciting short book to be published later in the year.

COMMENT THREAD

Nice thoughts

Says the Adam Smith blog:

Parliament needs to be able to concentrate on two things: defence and the implementation of a system of justice. Local government needs to be the level where decisions over health, education, welfare etc are made.

The abolition of quangos should not mean that government departments take over the work. It should be left for local councils to pick up and ask the people to decide.

Indeed government departments define how centralized this country has become. We may all live on an island but we all are different with different wants and needs. The time has come for a radical reshaping of the structure of democracy in this country. It would actually give power to the people.

There is, of course, that minor thing over in Brussels called the European Union – membership of which means there is no democracy in this country. As for defence, a picture is worth a thousand words.

COMMENT THREAD

Staying with it

Although it has hardly set the blogosphere on fire (or done our hit rate any good), I believe the Farrell kidnap and his rescue to be important, with profound consequences. We look at these on Defence of the Realm.

COMMENT THREAD

Getting to the truth

One should applaud the skill, planning and sheer bravery that went into to rescue this morning of New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell (pictured), and lament the death of a special forces soldier who died in the raid in order to secure his freedom and, most probably, save his life.

Reports, necessarily, are sketchy, but we are told that a British "commando" was killed in the pre-dawn raid, set up after Farrell and his Afghan interpreter, Mohammad Sultan, were kidnapped by the Taleban last Saturday after travelling to the site of the air strike near Kunduz in which up to 125 people were reported killed. Mohammed Sultan, unfortunately, was also killed in the raid.

Mr Farrell will now, undoubtedly, be fêted for his bravery and fortitude. Doubtless, he will dine out on his experiences for many a month and, in the fullness of time, launch a "best-selling" book, which will be lauded by his fellow hacks, who will heap praise upon him in a glowing series of reviews.

Small recognition will be given to the member of the special forces who died for his freedom – the man, as is the convention, will not even be named. And while Farrell undoubtedly takes risks, his courage is always tempered by the fact that, should he get himself into a predicament – as he did here – there are always men such as our anonymous special forces soldier, who are prepared to forefit their lives to extricate him.

One does not in any way denigrate Mr Farrell's own courage. We need journalists such as him who are prepared to put themselves at risk to gather information on the wars fought in our name. They are the foot soldiers in a different kind of battle, and they are an important part of the matrix from which we learn, and are able to build up an understanding – albeit imperfect – of what is going on.

This we noted in an earlier piece, when we applauded the efforts of Tom Coughlan, for his vivid reports from the front, putting himself at considerable risk in gathering his accounts.

But we would take issue with the comments of Stephen Grey, journalist and author of Operation Snakebite quoted – or perhaps misquoted – in The Daily Telegraph. He tells us, of Farrell, that: "He is the sort of person who realises that you have to get out of your comfort zone beyond the wire in order to work out the truth."

The issue here, of course, is the word "truth". Mr Farrell, any more than the rest of us, is not in a position to acquire that precious commodity. It is not there for the taking, but emerges only – if at all – from the labours of many, over a period of time. It is built on information from multifarious sources, needing most often the perspective which only time and distance can give.

As a custodian of the truth, in fact, Mr Farrell has a poor record. As a journalist in Iraq – where he was briefly kidnapped – he was one of the first to report on the growing power of the militias, reporting in May 2003, for The Times of the return to Iraq of Mohammed Bakr al Hakim, de facto leader of the Badr Corps, which was to give the British some grief in Basra.

Although Farrell continued covering the war in Iraq, reporting for The Times and subsequently for the New York Times, he was one of the many journalists who misread the signs and failed completely to understand the importance and political significance of Malki's operation Charge of the Knights in late March 2008.

Thus, in early April 2008 did Farrell, alongside his NYT colleague James Glanz, famously (mis)report that the "crackdown on the Mahdi Army militia is creating potentially destabilizing political and military tensions in Iraq."

Farrell, in common with many of his colleagues, from outside the "comfort zone beyond the wire", added much information on the situation – with some fine reporting and good follow-up, but missed the bigger picture.

No more now than then does any one journalist offer the "truth". But too many of them, from the narrow perspective they gain from being briefly at the sharp end, picking up part of the picture directly and thus contributing to the flow of information on which we all so much rely, believe they have a greater claim to being its custodian than perhaps is warranted.

And then, in the final analysis, the ultimate custodians are – for all their failings – the military. For only as a result of their bravery do the likes of Farrell live to tell their tales.

COMMENT THREAD