Tomorrow at twelve noon in Cardiff the names of the fallen in Afghanistan will be read.
The statue of Aneurin Bevan is the appropriate venue. There will be some rousing speeches. Public opinion is changing. Hearing the long list of the fallen is always moving. A demonstrator was arrested and eventually imprisoned after reading the names of the Iraqi war read at the Cenotaph. The law has now been changed. Tony Benn last week led the reading of the names.
In parliament I have published in Early Day Motions lists of the dead in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I have also copied them on blogs. In an Iraq debate I used the ten minutes of my allotted time to read the names of the 179 dead. It is not possible to read the ranks and the names in ten minutes, so I confined myself to the names. That takes eight minutes. In July I read the Afghan list at the end of a 25 minute speech.
It will not be possible to do that again. It has been decided that the announcement by the Prime Minister of each new death is 'sufficient.' After last year recess, Gordon Brown read out eighteen names.
Tragically the list in October will certainly be much longer. By then, public support may well have crumbled.
Chinook ignored
The butterfly concentration of the media is on display today.
There has been acres of publicity on the peripheral issue of helicopters in Afghanistan. It was an excuse for not thinking.
Yesterday Britain lost one of only eight Chinooks. It was brought down by Taliban fire. But it was not a SAM missile but machine gun and rocket propelled weapons. Yet there was hardly a mention of the loss in today's news.
I wonder why that is.
Total what?
Two weeks ago I named my favourite blogs.
One of them is BBC's Vaughan Roderick's blog. He is in the top ten of media blogs in the UK's Total Politics poll. That's astonishing. Perhaps I should defend the ratings because this blog is among the top ten political blogs.
While Vaughan deserves the rating, it's impossible that his position is a fair reflection of a large vote across the UK. The blog is written entirely in Welsh. The result follows a campaign promoting Plaid Cymru blogs. Other parts of the country do not have blogs that have been begging for votes for weeks.
Not so much Total Politics. More Total B*llocks.
Total of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan = 206
Obama and Brown sound just like Bush and Blair.
Posted by: Adam | August 22, 2009 at 11:19 PM
Obama would make himself unpopular by increasing troop numbers. On the other hand he is being advised by McCrhystal to increase troops or face certain defeat. The only choice is to withdraw. Anything else is futile and ultimately disastrous.
Posted by: Adam | October 03, 2009 at 12:17 AM
Yes, I believe this is a tough decision for Obama. His instincts and conviction urged him to avoid repeating VietNam. He will be exposed and blamed for the inevitable calamity if he disregards the advice of the military.
Posted by: Paul Flynn | October 03, 2009 at 08:04 AM