When Vince Cable showed the right attitude to the Saudi regime

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In the autumn of 2009, while Nick Clegg was taking paternity leave, there was a state visit to Britain by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The acting Liberal Democrat leader, Vince Cable,* showed the right attitude to the Saudi regime. As BBC News reported it at the time:

Liberal Democrat acting leader Vince Cable is boycotting the state visit to Britain of Saudi King Abdullah. 

Mr Cable says he will not attend any of the planned ceremonial events - as would be normal for the leader of one of the main opposition parties. 

Mr Cable told the BBC's Today programme that by any assessment of Saudi Arabia, "the human rights record is appalling". 

He also cited the regime's arms deal with the British firm BAE and the row over alleged corruption surrounding it. 

Mr Cable added: "I think it's quite wrong that as a country we should give the leader of Saudi Arabia this honour."

If you read the post I wrote at the time, you will find that Vince's stance was criticised by both Tory (Liam Fox)** and Labour (Kin Howells).***

Today we have Union Jacks**** flying at half mast in memory of King Abdullah and a Lib Dem deputy prime minister who remains silent.

True, Nick Clegg condemned the flogging sentence passed on the blogger Raif Badawi, but only after he had claimed to know nothing about the case.

I wonder how his silence this week strikes people who voted for us in 2010 because they admired the Lib Dems' strong stance on human rights?

Notes

* Presumably it would be Danny Alexander today.

** As in "whatever happened to Liam Fox?"

*** As in "Makes Neil Kinnock sound like a Trappist monk."

**** It is perfectly in order to call it the Union Jack. The idea that should call it the "Union Flag" is QIesque sophistry.

House Points: What is Kim Howells?

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Perhaps the truth is that, like John Reid, Howells has just been a consistent authoritarian all his life. Hornsey College of Art at the sit-in point at something more libertarian, or am I just being seduced by the glamour of the sixties?

Incidentally, do people still read Kim. They certainly should do. When someone told Evan Davis on the Today programme this morning that India was Kipling's home, he scoffed at the idea. He would not have done that if he had read his best book.

Kim what?

“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” Kipling’s young hero asks himself repeatedly. These days there is an even harder question: What is Kim Howells?

Because today this former student radical and former Communist union official finds himself defending Britain’s intelligence services unreservedly when even many Conservatives fear they have been complicit in the torture of suspects overseas. It’s worse than that: the head of MI5 sounded more reasonable than Howells when when he raised his head the other day.

Last week Howells, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), said any such suggestion was “a calumny and a slur and it should not be made”. For good measure he added “I don’t know what the Master of the Rolls is ... playing at.” (In my experience senior judges don’t play much. They tend to be rather serious about things.)

When it was set up, the ISC was loaded with senior parliamentarians so that it would have the clout to hold the security services to account, yet its chairman prefers to act as their cheerleader. (Perhaps they won him over by letting him play with their invisible ink?)

It has been a long journey to reach this lonely position. Howells first came to public notice in 1968 as the student organiser of a sit-in at Hornsey College of Art in North London. He reappeared in the eighties as a Communist research officer with the National Union of Mineworkers in South Wales during the strike of 1984-5 .

He became a Labour MP in 1989 and soon found himself a member of Neil Kinnock’s inner circle. One theory is that he received this rapid promotion because he was the only person who made Kinnock’s sound laconic and crisp in comparison. When Labour came back into government he filled a succession of ministerial positions, and now finds himself, in effect, the spokesman for the intelligence services.

You could say this is a common story: a young firebrand turns into a reactionary. But what story do people like Howells tell themselves. Do they detect a golden thread of principle that has run through their careers or do they prefer not to think about the past?

So the question remains: “What is Kim?”

Tinchy Stryder and Norman Lamb

I am sure my readers all know who Tinchy Stryder is, but I had better point out that Norman Lamb is the Lib Dem MP for North Norfolk.

Anyway, there is an article about their unlikely collaboration in this morning's Guardian:

Lamb ... is not the first parliamentarian to invite a rapper to the Commons, nor is he the first MP to express an opinion about British hip-hop: there was the former culture secretary, Kim Howells, who derided the briefly popular but trouble-prone So Solid Crew as "idiot macho rappers", while David Cameron managed to get himself embroiled in a slanging match with Lethal Bizzle over whether his lyrics glorified gun crime. But it is safe to say Lamb is the first MP to remortgage his home to finance a rapper's career.

The House Points Awards

My column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

HP Awards

Welcome to the 2007 House Points Awards, coming to you live from the Mecca Ballroom, Goole. (Our investigations revealed that there is no Goole Ballroom in Mecca.)

The first award is for The Most Absurd Statement by a Labour MP. There was support for Graham Allen’s thoughts on Tory sleaze: "It took a Labour government to end those scandals and introduce legislation to bring greater transparency to party funding." As one judge said, it is not enough to pass new laws: you have to obey them.

But the winner is Kim Howells for his assertion that Britain and Saudi Arabia can unite around our "shared values". Only a couple of weeks after he said it, a Saudi court sentenced a rape victim to be jailed and flogged. Sheer genius from Howells.

Next up is the Greatest Waste of Public Money. There were voices in support of London’s 2012 Olympic bid – current estimated cost £9.325bn and rising, against an original figure of £1.796bn. But again one candidate stands out: let’s hear it for Jonathan Ross and his £4.5m salary from the BBC.

Politician of the Year did not detain the judges long: Vince Cable is our unanimous choice. But the award for Campaign of the Year gave rise to more discussion.

Eventually we chose our winner: John Hemming. Using his blog, John has been waging war on the secrecy and excessive powers of the family courts and child protection services.

Finally, The Most Absurd Economic Statement of the Year. Here it proved impossible to separate two outstanding nominations, so there are joint winners: George Osborne and Alistair Darling.

Osborne set a high standard with his suggestion that "50-odd million people" are currently "living off the back of those who work in financial services".

But Darling was not to be outdone. He replied to some gentle Tory hints about tax cuts with: "Take £21 billion out of the economy and it's bound to have an effect." Whatever you think of tax cuts, it’s bizarre to think that only government spending counts as part of the economy.

So there you have the House Points Awards. And for those of you who couldn’t get through to vote for Rhydian, we promise to have more lines next year.

Saudi gang-rape victim to be jailed and flogged

The BBC reports:

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man's car at the time of the attack.

When she appealed, the judges said she had been attempting to use the media to influence them.

Time, I think, to remember the words of one Labour minister at the time of King Abdullah's recent visit:

Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has called for Britain and Saudi Arabia to work more closely together, despite their differences.

Mr Howells told a conference ahead of a state visit by Saudi leader King Abdullah that the two states could unite around their "shared values".

Vince Cable boycotts the Saudi king

Congratulations to Vince Cable for his refusal to attend any of the ceremonial events associated with the state visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

I was also struck by the emptiness of the Conservative response:

Conservative shadow defence secretary Liam Fox warned that Mr Cable's move would be seen as "juvenile gesture politics" and risked insulting one of Britain's main allies in the Gulf.

This could have come from a most starry-eyed Blairite junior minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Fox has nothing new to say and nothing to add because he agrees with current government policy.

The Conservatives' trouble is that many senior members of their shadow cabinet - and Fox is prominent amongst them - are essentially neo-cons. Because of this they have no time for the traditional Tory scepticism about foreign entanglements when Britain's national interest is not directly affected.

And what exactly is this main ally in the Gulf of ours like? This morning's Independent gives us the answer:

While King Abdullah is cheered by our political leaders, many of his victims will be protesting outside. Sandy Mitchell, 52, went to Saudi Arabia to work as an anaesthetic technician at a hospital in Riyadh more than a decade ago – and got a rare outsider's glimpse into how the king maintains his power. He explains: "One day in 2000 I was getting out of my car at the hospital when I was pounced on. I was battered to the ground, a hood was put over my head, and they manacled my hands and feet. I thought – I'm being kidnapped."

He woke up in the Madhethe interrogation centre, where the Saudi police demanded he confess to being a British spy ordered to plant bombs in the country. He told then the bombs were obviously the work of Saudi Islamists – a view now accepted to be true – so they hung him upside down and began to beat his feet and buttocks with an axe handle for eight days. All the while, he could hear his friend Bill Sampson being gang-raped in the next room.

Mr Mitchell was eventually released after 32 months, when he was swapped for several Saudi citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay. But he warns: "The torture chambers in Saudi weren't created for me. These rooms were like a human abattoir. There was years' worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived, but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who don't survive those chambers."

Later. According to the BBC, Kim Howells:

told a conference ahead of a state visit by Saudi leader King Abdullah that the two states could unite around their "shared values".