Today’s post will include a little about all of the following:

1) Scratching-my-head-comments-I-don’t-understand
2) Iran and Iraq
3) Gordon Brown and the dividend tax
4) News on a personal level

In response to my last post I received three comments that I’m still puzzling over. I think I must come across as a fairly self-sufficient blogger, as I don’t usually get a lot of comments; maybe the sheer amount of verbiage frightens people off.

So three comments about the same post that I can’t make head nor tail of seems remarkable. Of course I can understand them in one sense but I can’t precisely identify what in my blog prompted them because they have a Delphic quality (or do I mean gnomic?); “if you run after two hares you will catch neither”, for instance. Was it my remarks about Boots that prompted that or the possibility of microchip brain implants?

The comments have more in common than all being Delphic (or gnomic), I tried visiting the urls in the e-mail and they appear to be the same place – something to do with motor yachts (gin palaces) and guitars. Maybe the comments themselves are one of the hares referred to. Incidentally, I wasn’t aware that it was possible for a man to catch a hare – without a dog, I mean.

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To continue with normal blogging themes, the Royal Navy hostages continue to pur the media in a spin. The only clear theme to the coverage of the crisis in the news is that the UK isn’t getting the support it deserves from abroad. The UN has – shockingly – failed to condemn the kidnapping even though the victims were on UN duties at the time. The EU has come up with a condemnation but isn’t matching the words with actions in the form of economic sanctions. There’s some excuse for the French government to avoid decisive action while they hold another bitter and divisive presidential election but the same doesn’t hold for the Germans who do a lot of business with Tehran and could really make the Iranians sit up and take notice if they interrupted all the turbine spare parts exports.

The other viewpoint that has appeared is that Britain has become a proxy for the US. The argument seems to run something like this: the Iranians dare not kidnap US personnel because the United States might do something very nasty indeed in retaliation. Not only that but there’s no scope for negotiating with the US, no diplomatic relations, no ‘relationship’ of any kind that anyone will admit to. This is why the Americans can’t offer any help to Britain in our present fix. But the UK is apparently likened to America in Iranian consciousness. We’re allies in Iraq and like the Americans we interfered in Iran, although it was back in the fifties.

Ultimately though, the kidnapping isn’t about us, any more than bullying is ‘about’ the playground victims. It’s all to do with (explosive) public opinion in Iran and the wider Middle East and the under the surface conflicts within the Iranian regime.

Although the government may be struggling to identify the right course of action for the immediate future and we don’t know how long the Royal Navy/Royal Marine personnel are going to be in captivity, the medium-term outcome is clear enough: a large section of the media and the public in this part of the world are going to be ‘on their (the Iranians’) case’ for some time to come. And this is by no means a bad thing in view of Iran’s potential for doing harm.

In a way the dilemma posed by the illegal arrest mirrors the general uncertainty of the times. I sense we’re moving out of the period of consensus that the invasion of Iraq was mistake and wrong. Not that the majority of people are changing their minds on this but it’s ceasing to be a pointer to show us whither now, just as the war on terror after 9/11 stopped being a useful compass bearing about the time the allies invaded Iraq.

Possibly the time is coming when it’s going to be necessary to stand up to Iran and its weapons plans but it’s going to be very difficult to find a catalyst for that consensus.

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I have to admit that the ending of pension fund dividend tax relief in 1997 passed me unawares. Nevertheless, I’ve been following the coverage about the light that it sheds on Gordon Brown, the leader in waiting, with interest. One thing that I haven’t heard so far is the argument that has been put forward before about this tax; that pension fund members already receive 100% tax relief on their pension contributions (unless the contributions are enormous) so there’s no particular reason for them to benefit from tax relief on these dividends. Having said that, I believe Gordon Brown did make two mistakes in connection with this change. The first mistake was that he didn’t make sufficient allowance for just how bad the British are at saving and the second, related error was not to warn the public and the pensions industry that contributions would need to be higher to make up for the cut the Treasury was taking. I think that circumstances conspired to make the original decision more harmful than it was expected to be in that it was taken at a time when the stock market was on the up before the dotcom bubble burst and pension financing was believed to be sounder than it really was. When the bubble did burst the Chancellor and the Bank of England were more interested in shoring up confidence than in warning everybody to be more provident. Maybe the Chancellor and the Treasury did know better than that but knowledge that isn’t widely shared can be curse (the one eyed man is NOT king in the land of the blind).

While on the subject of Gordon Brown, he should realise that a man who has been likened to Stalin should avoid all children (except his own) like the plague. This kind of media coverage just shouts power-crazed monster.

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I’ve been quite taken up with my elderly relatives property purchase and have been slowly ploughing through the ARHM Code of Practice – excellent bedtime reading.

Really good bedtime reading was Joel Ross’s ‘Double Cross Bind’ about an American volunteer trying to combat a spy ring in London in late 1941. The geography of London seemed a little skewed and I thought more could have been made of the rarity of a (crucial) fridge in 1941 but the characters are very deftly drawn.

Yesterday we made a short trip to look at the new lambs in the fields near Chiddingfold. There was a cruel wind and I was afraid dead branches were going to fall on us but it was lovely to see them.

Still not walking; things to do in the garden such as removing our fallen tree. The stump is still too heavy for me to shift without straining a muscle. I've been using my small axe on it.