I’ve been up early blogging after a longer than usual between-post gap. Today’s post will include the following:

1) Where I’ve been
2) What’s happening to our politics (not quite historical parallels)
3) The troops out arguments
4) More personal stuff

Where I have been is on another short break in Lancashire with my in-laws. We rented the same adjacent holiday cottages about 1½ miles from Chipping in the Forest of Bowland. Of course, we benefited from last week’s unseasonably fine weather. Like our November visit we didn’t do a lot except take short strolls, explore in the car, read our books* and play whist in the evening. The overall effect was pleasant and beneficial. I had a holiday from work-hunting (though I’m thinking of acquiring a lap top for future trips) and my partner had a break (much needed) from real work. As well as going back to places we’d visited in the past we went to Stocks Reservoir on the edge of Gisburn forest. The reservoir looked a bit on the low side but possibly this is to encourage the wading birds and not because there hasn’t been enough rain.

I brought back some Ribblesdale sheep’s cheese to try. This is good, slightly drier than any other sheep’s cheeses I’ve tasted; I recommend it to anyone else who is avoiding dairy produce.

(I was reading ‘Every secret Thing’ by Emma Cole. It’s a tale of secret service intrigues in wartime New York and Lisbon. I enjoyed it but there was a funeral service on a Saturday afternoon that seemed unlikely and made it more difficult for me to ‘suspend disbelief.’)

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It’s looking almost certain that there won’t be any challengers to Gordon Brown for No. 10 who will be a serious threat but no one can quite believe it. It’s as if we’re watching a production of Julius Ceasar with no Cassius or Brutus. I was sceptical about David Miliband standing as a candidate for the superficial reason that, not having seen a photograph of him, I had only a vague idea what he looked like. I accept that this is mainly down to my not watching the television news much or reading enough newspapers but I decided that a serious contender would have been more visible.
On a serious note, there must be something wrong with the way that the Labour Party works for this situation to have arisen. And, if the governing party can’t have a proper contest for it’s leadership the whole system of party politics must surely be beginning to crumble. We have a lot over the last 20 years about the loss of members by the main parties (and hence their need for public money to spend on electioneering) but it looks as the internal politics of the Labour Party is withering away. Labour MPs are acting as if the last general election wasn’t really a victory, that many of them are going to lose their seats in 2009/10 and that they are already history. Rather than behaving as if they have power over Gordon Brown’s political career, they appear more like the Rump Parliament waiting for Oliver Cromwell to sweep them away (that’s the only historical parallel I could come up with).

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Now that the peerages for cash findings are in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service it looks as if Tony Blair’s last few weeks as Prime Minister in going to be in deep shadow. I’m sorry if careers are going to be ruined through this scandal because I believe that in end the mistakes will be seen to have been through ignorance of how the law stood rather than deliberate law-breaking.

The roots of the problem are connected to the loss of mass support by the main parties. If the Labour and Conservative parties were funded by their members’ subscriptions (surely, the only right way for them to be financed), tapping into the resources of the very wealthy would never have seemed a sensible option. Now it looks as if we’re heading towards parties becoming funded mostly out of taxes but the politicians seem blind to how such a move is going to make the political process yet more unpopular.

The other almost direct consequence of peerages for cash is the door closing on appointed peers. The scandal of bought appointments aside, there are some very good arguments in favour of the present system of life peers. The House of Lords has brought a lot of thought and expertise to bear on a whole range of subjects in recent years – eg. incitement to religious hatred, restraints on the mentally ill, assisted suicide and so on. In the future it looks as if all this expertise is going to be lost and instead there will just be placemen from the party machines.

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Last week’s suicide bombing in Baghdad that resulted in 200 deaths in a single day has thrown President Bush’s surge policy into disarray and strengthened the hand of those who want the Americans to withdraw. Those opposing withdrawal are forced to rely on unimpressive arguments such as America’s moral responsibility for what’s happening in Iraq, the modest signs of security improvements that Mr Al Maliki’s government can point to and how much worse everything could get if there were no allied troops in Iraq. The Today programme included a telling feature playing recordings of various people using the word ‘desperate’ in the context of terrorist atrocities in Iraq. The conclusion was that politicians have been describing these events as ‘desperate’ final manifestations of insurgents’ power for four years now.

The question that the supporters of troops out don’t seem to have an answer to is what will happen in Iraq once the allies are gone. If the allies go home too abruptly, it does look as if there will be a civil war in the centre of the country. Whichever side looked as if it was going to win in such a conflict, the influence of Iran over Iraq would probably increase. If the Sunnis looked like being victorious the Iranians would interfere to help the Shi’ites and if the Shi’ites were winning the Iranians would probably excerpt influence covertly to shore up the Iraqi government. Given the share of the world’s oil supplies these two countries control an Iraqi civil war could be a disaster for the economy of the whole world.

Also last week there was an interview with Brigadier Tim Evans, the current commander of British forces in Basra. The Brigadier certainly wasn’t agreeing with John Humphries that everything was a mess down there. It sounded as if the British forces really would be ready for a hand over to the Iraqi army in the foreseeable future. This is fine as far as it goes but a semblance of law and order in Basra doesn’t necessarily mean no danger of civil war in Iraq as a whole. The government continues to be reluctant to put up any ministers for BBC interviews on how a British troop withdrawal might harmonise with what the Americans are trying to do further north.

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Now we’re back home it feels as if summer is fully fledged with all the regular chores to do in the garden. I’m feeling a bit behind on the one-off tasks such as putting up a gutter along the shed roof, washing the garden furniture, finally being able to remove the tree stump so that the replacement fence panel can go up. However, yesterday I started stripping the varnish off our pine dining room chairs. The plan is that they should be stained a darker colour to match the table. This has gone well (so far) but the varnish remover had a horrible smell. I think I’ll leave the chairs outside tonight.

On the work front I’m close to getting some work maintaining the content of a website. To begin with this may take up a lot of my time but longer term I’m hopeful that the time needed will be more proportionate to the amount I’m being paid to do the work.

Finally, I had a great day last Saturday (my birthday) which included a visit to our favourite bluebell wood. We caught them at their peak, I reckon, and enjoyed ourselves digitally photographing them for the first time. Birdworld proved to be well worth the visit, too.