How strange that we pay so much attention to MI5 and its boss, Ken McCallum, warning us last week about all the dangers supposedly lurking around the earth, which just so happens to justify its huge budget. Have you ever heard the head of a tax-funded organization begging for fewer resources or downplaying their importance? No, neither do I.
Well, you can believe all this if you wish. But first ask yourself what MI5 is. The answer is disturbing and doesn't fit my idea of what kind of country this is.
Many people mistakenly refer to it as a spy service and its boss as a “spy chief.” But it's not. It works entirely from home. In fact, it is a secret police force that once, justifiably, kept under surveillance Nazi and communist sympathizers, who in many cases actively worked for our national enemies during World War II and the Cold War. This was probably necessary, even if the idea is quite repulsive.
The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, who warned us last week about all the dangers supposedly roaming the earth, which happens to justify his huge budget
The great novelist John le Carre, for example, snooped on his fellow students at Oxford in quite underhanded ways, looking for communists, before moving in quite unusual ways to organizing foreign intelligence. MI6. This experience of pretending to be someone's friend to gain their trust helped make him a good writer. But it wasn't very pleasant and led to some bitter rapes when his targets discovered what he was doing years later.
When I was a revolutionary Marxist in the 1960s and early 1970s, MI5 undoubtedly spied on me too. I expected this and thought it was very funny, and a few years ago, in the early years of New Labor, I tried to get my MI5 file. A minister said this should be possible now. It wasn't. Even after taking my case to something called the Information Court, I got nowhere. And now I'm convinced that I couldn't see my dossier because it no longer exists. My archive, along with thousands of others from the same era, was thrown into some secret furnace and is lost forever.
I suspect this happened when the Blair government, packed as it was with 1960s Marxists from Blair on down, came to power. I believe a purge of “subversive” records was ordered, and mine went to the stake along with Blair's and about a quarter of his cabinet.
Since then, MI5, like the rest of the establishment, has become a left-wing organization. We can see that it longs above all to uncover nests of “far-right extremists,” and it will only take a few more leftward shifts in our political system to turn ordinary patriotic conservatives into subjects of surveillance. I suppose we will probably need such an organization, although it is very difficult to verify whether the arrogant claims it makes about its own effectiveness are true.
But we must be careful not to let it become too big for the boots. Your boss shouldn't make political speeches. In general, I preferred it when we were a little ashamed of even having a body like that and pretended it didn't exist.
Kate and Lee share hunger
Kate Winslet as war photographer Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller in her new film Lee, which saw her praised for her performance
Sometimes I wonder if World War II has been explored enough by the film industry. But I was surprised to find myself moved and absorbed by Lee, Kate Winslet's new film about the war photographer Lee Miller, a normally trivial person, living a turbulent life, who discovered, in that war, what the poet Philip Larkin called his “a hunger in [herself] be more serious'. Kate Winslet is becoming a great actress, ready to make a virtue of age rather than being afraid of it.
It has been 509 days since Lucy Letby was told she would die in prison.
The last place in the world where everyone still believes his conviction is safe appears to be the ridiculous Thirlwall Inquiry, which has turned a blind eye to the huge amount of expert evidence that suggests there is something seriously wrong.
If Mrs Letby was wrongly convicted, then every extra day she spends in prison is a disgrace. The establishment will, sooner or later, have to reopen the case. Why not continue with this?
Drop HS2 before it swallows all our money
And yet our leaders refuse to give up on High Speed Two (HS2 for short), the crazy and ultra-expensive scheme to build a high-speed railway from London to Birmingham.
Apparently, if it is ever completed, much of the journey will be in a tunnel. Apart from the fact that what this country really needs is the reopening of the medium-speed rail network, which was crazily closed in the 1960s, we are not good at continental-style Grand Projects. They are always decades behind schedule and over budget by billions, and then they don't work properly.
Work continues at the HS2 high speed railway construction site on Curzon Street in Birmingham earlier this month
Meanwhile, my hometown of Oxford has been devastated for long months by what I will call Low Speed One, a project to build a few hundred meters of railway track, a wider bridge and a new platform at the decrepit, infiltrated station. city railway. . The works, a perpetual quagmire of wet mud snaking with pipes and wires and filled with dump trucks and vehicles incessantly shouting “Reversing!”, closed the main east-west road through Oxford and forced pedestrians into a narrow checkpoint. and dark, Berlin-style. between the two halves of the city. It never seems to come close to completion.
Its main scheduled dates were recently canceled and no one knows when it will be completed.
We live in a world of illusion, convinced that we are richer and more competent than we really are. It's fun, as I get older, to wonder how many of the big construction projects I see around me will still be in operation after I'm gone.
Come on, Johnson, what are you afraid of? I have been asking you to debate the issue of Ukraine for months. People are still dying because people like you don't understand what is happening or don't know what to do. You might at least learn something.
Let's say thank you first…
An M&S Christmas advert in its central Oxford store – with more than two months to go until the holidays
I found Marks & Spencer advertising Christmas in their central store in Oxford on October 8th. I tend to think this is commercial desperation rather than sacrilege. And it has something to do with the fact that we have no equivalent to the pleasant American and Canadian Thanksgiving festivals at the end of November, a pleasant break and an excuse to shop.
We have much to be thankful for and I suggest inaugurating a British Thanksgiving every year on the Thursday closest to November 30th, Winston Churchill's birthday.
