The truth sometimes hurts

One of the amusing stories in the British press this week has been that of the Howard School for Boys in Rainham where some end of term school reports written by teachers on their pupils were apparently lost in transit and found in the street by a member of the public. This worthy, rather than return the reports to the school, had a quick read and then decided to send them to the local radio station as they contained rather unflattering remarks about some of the pupils. One boy was described as a 'dingbat', another 'a complete wally', a third as 'away with the fairies' and one pupil's mother was described as 'really rather rough'.



Although these descriptions are not too complimentary, I can easily understand the frustration of teachers in compiling their assessments, particularly if the comments were not intended to be seen outside the staff room. It must be teeth gritting to have to come up with some sanitised, homogenised pap for parents to read when you really want to scream what you really think of their little horror.

It just struck me, based on memories of my own and my family's schooldays, that a useful list of euphemistic end of term comments could be easily compiled and translated for internal use:

So Ive come up with an end of term report for parents followed by its staff room equivalent in parentheses.

"Your son's capacity to absorb and retain detail is a matter of some concern"

(Complete Dickhead)

"His tendency towards physically assertive behaviour overshadows his academic achievements"

(Total psycho who should be in special needs)


"He is a popular boy, but has an extrovert attitude towards the curriculum which can be distracting for all concerned."

(The form clown)


"Has been showing emotional traits which I fear are not conducive to his welfare within the school and about which I would welcome an opportunity for a discussion."

(Definitely showing gay tendencies about which the poor bastard is tormented mercilessly)


"He is a co-operative and willing student whose laudable desire to please can sometimes mask a lack of comprehension"

(A total suck-up with the brains of a gnat)


"A boy who has shown intermittent signs of genuine ability but whose mental awareness appears to be hampered by what I perceive to be undesirable influences. I would welcome an opportunity to discuss the relevance of what appears to be a highly unusual home environment in this situation.

(A crack-head who turns up stoned on the stuff his father deals outside the school gates)

..and of course there must be more. Anyone reading this blog, especially if you are a frustrated teacher, please send more!!

Tony Blair: a dangerous little twerp

Today I have done something I've not done on this blog before. I have 'pinched' a complete newspaper article by Robert Fisk and published in 'The Independent' today. Why? Because it's a masterpiece of a funeral oration to our soon-to-be-gone Prime Minister..and I couldn't better it!


'By great good fortune, I studied linguistics at Lancaster University. Indeed, I read the books of Noam Chomsky, many years before he became a good friend of mine; to be honest, when I read his work, I thought Chomsky was dead. What a pleasure, therefore, to discover that he shared my world - and my views on Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.

But I have to admit a moment of regret this weekend. Lord Blair is going from us. His self-serving memoirs will, of course, remind us of his God-like view of himself (and, heaven spare me, we share the same publishers) but I doubt if Chomsky's "foregrounded elements" will save him. A "foregrounded element" was something unusual, a phrase placed in such a way that it warned us of a lie to come.




Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell when the US Secretary of State was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn't refer to evidence of WMD as a "slam dunk", he says - a basketball phrase which I don't need to explain. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn't lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Blair's lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read "Saudi reforms lose momentum" - surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press - it quoted our dear Prime Minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians home because their government represented a "different political system". The "foregrounded" element, of course, is the word "different". This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason why the committee declined to return these men to their country was not - as Blair well knew - because Algeria possesses a "different" political system but because the Algerian "system" allows it to torture to death its prisoners.

I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Chateauneuf police station in Algiers - where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui whose foot was broken under torture. She was a "terrorist", this man announced. This is the "different" political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. He knows this. So how does he dare lie about the "different" political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A "different" political system indeed.

And now I have before me Blair's repulsive "goodbye" speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn't mean "doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom" (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the "prevailing consensus: (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant "what you genuinely believe to be right" (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with Britain's oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) "I did so out of belief," he told us. Foregrounded element: belief.

Am I alone in being repulsed by this? "Politics may be the art of the possible (foregrounded element: may) but, at least in life, give the impossible a go." What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right." Excuse me? Is that Blair's message to the families of all those dead soldiers - and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an "honour" to "serve" Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo-Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour - and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

My Dad used to call people like Blair a "twerp" which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell's statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Downfall of an arrogant man

At one time, in Britain, there was a joke poll to suggest the best epitaph on Margaret Thatcher's gravestone when the time eventually came, and one wag suggested 'Licensed for Dancing'. That's exactly how I feel, politically speaking, about the demise of Paul Wolfowitz, who, it has been announced, will step down from his job as president of the World Bank on June 30th.



Donald Rumsfeld's former second-in-command, arch neo-con and one of the prime architects of the Iraq War stepped into the prestigious job two years ago, a job that has always been held by an American.

He had shown his arrogant dismissal of critics and detractors during his destructive years in government but in this august role the man excelled himself. Wolfowitz did notify the Bank of his relationship with a Bank employee, Shaha Riza, and proposed that, to avoid a 'conflict of interest' Ms. Riza be moved to the State Department which he had the power to organise. The Bank agreed with the proposed solution but Wolfowitz went further, ensuring that his girlfriend was paid way above the rate for the role she was to undertake and in fact at a salary which exceeded that of Condoleeza Rice the US Secretary of State.

When confronted with this, Wolfowitz conceded 'mistakes had been made' - but that it was simply a technical issue and not a resigning matter.

Wolfowitz has caused embarrassment for the Bank by hanging on like a limpet and refusing to quit. He sought, and initially obtained, support from the Bush Administration despite a growing clamour from Bank officials all around the globe that he should go. This arrogant man, when interviewed by a Bank committee last week, even suggested that the position of the World Bank vis a vis its relationship with the American government could be jeopardised if he was forced to quit. The sheer nerve of the man!

Before yesterday's announcement was made I guessed the writing was on the wall for Paul Wolfowitz when a question was asked of President Bush during his press conference with Tony Blair. The questioner asked if Wolfowitz continued to have Bush's support and, a rarity, Bush paused, weighed his words carefully and said 'Paul Wolfowitz has done a fine job and I'm sorry it has come to this'. Those few words spelled out the fact that the White House was no longer prepared to invest any time in him.

And so this man, who thought his track record in government made him bullet-proof and who was determined to hang on regardless of ongoing damage to the institution over which he presided has finally had the mat pulled from under his feet. May it be a long, long drop!

Royalty and the armed forces

Its a long time since our Monarchs and their offspring would lead the troops personally into battle with cries like 'For Harry, England and St. George'...and that certainly won't happen for the current Prince Harry. Of course no one expects the direct heirs of our monarchs to stick their noses down the barrel of an Iraqi tank but still the Royals continue the age old tradition of sending young Princes to officer training school where they can become leaders of men.



Well after all, Prince Andrew was an intrepid helicopter pilot during the Falklands War risking life and limb just like his men, his courage and.....yeah, yeah, yeah I don't believe it either. But at least he went and showed his face.

What has now happened to the young Prince Harry is, frankly, humiliating. He follows the family tradition, goes to Sandhurst, leads how to command the lower ranks and then....his regiment goes off to Iraq without him because he is too precious and might get killed. The army is of course doing the right thing because if Harry was targeted for kidnap or assassination a lot of other soldiers, who should be concentrating on doing their own jobs, would be deployed saving his ass, possibly at risk to themselves and could draw fire because Harry was there.

I feel sorry for the young lad. I believe he was genuine about wanting to be seen leading his men, and he must be gutted to be told he is to be left at home like some milksop. He must wonder what the real hard boiled soldiers are saying about him.

We are in a changed and dangerous world where there are few safe postings for the Royal family to hang around for a few years and 'make men' of themselves.

Isn't it about time the Royal family, and its advisors, sat down and worked out an alternative career path for the young royal males, because this situation with Harry has to be a watershed in relations between monarchy and the army. The British Army should not, stretched as it is, be put in the awkward situation of training would be monarchs as officers only to let them stew around on parade grounds for 5 years while they are learning to be real men. For goodness sake lets give them some kind of civvy career they can succeed at and cease to be an embarrassment to the armed forces.

The nation of gun nuts gets ever nuttier!

For those of us who already think the United States is out of its collective tree in the ease with which most of its citizens, no matter how psychologically out of whack, seem to get guns today the nation - and the state of Illinois in particular - has excelled itself. It has granted a firearms licence to a 10 month old baby after his father sent in the standard application form and paid $5 for a licence.

Of course the laws being as strict as they are, the Illinois licensing authorities had to have firm evidence of the baby's desire to possess the weapon - a shotgun willed to him by his grandfather as an heirloom - so he had to sign the form himself, a little squiggle appears on the form - with a little parental help no doubt.

The application was at first rejected - whooaaaaa common sense rearing its unwanted head you may say? Er..no they had no query over the fact that he was only 10 months old but he had forgotten to tick the box that said he was a U.S. citizen. Oh well that's all right then! Soon corrected!

Once that was dealt with the proud little baby received his own gun licence complete with his personal details of age weight and height. I suppose the redeeming fact is that he is too young to pull the trigger and that as he grows older, intelligent and reasoned parenting will ensure that he learns responsibility and care. Uh huh!!

Intelligent parenting. Er..did I mention the kid's name? Its Bubba. Yes really!

The terrible anguish when your child is abducted

I suppose it happens somewhere, sometime, every day of every week but here in Britain, the nation has been absorbed for 12 days in the search for four year old Madeleine McCann, abducted as she slept from her holiday villa in Praia da Luz, Portugal by person or persons unknown.



This is not the place to vent my opinion on what I would do to anyone who committed such a heinous act but my heart goes out to Gerry and Kate McCann the child's parents who have maintained such a dignified and brave face over the 12 days of their child's disappearance.



Parents all over the world suffer tragedies and sadness with children - illness, disability, sometimes even death - but there must be a unique dimension to having a dearly loved child taken away from you and you not knowing if she is dead, alive, suffering....what? The distress that must cause is almost inconceivable unless ..heaven forbid...it ever happens to you.

Meanwhile as I write the police have arrested three people, we are not yet sure whether they are responsible, accomplices or just witnesses, nor is there any clue as to whether the child is safe somewhere or not.

I am not a religious man but I can only hope with all my heart that there is a happy outcome to all of this.

The King is (almost) dead! Long live the (presumed) King!

So Tony Blair finally made his much anticipated resignation speech yesterday sounding almost as if he had chosen to go, a speech full of the Blair mix of the apparently sincere and the sentimental. I thought at one point he was going to burst into 'I did it my way' or when he spoke with hand on heart of his devotion to Britain, 'I did what I did for Maria' ( anybody recall Tony Orlando?). Anyway Britain's king of the hammy exit has finally laid down an exit date amid gasps of relief from many of us.

Barring a miracle, for which many in the Labour Party have unsuccessfully prayed, Gordon Brown will move into the top job on June 27th, the date Blair hands his resignation to the Queen.



What can we expect from a Brown premiership. Well, dealing with the cosmetics first, it will be almost a breath of fresh air to see the dark, brooding, glowering face of the ultimate political professional on our screens in contrast to Teflon Tony's toothy Colgate grin as he tippy toes to his next photo opportunity.

Brown is not glamorous. He can also be awkward, surly and downright bloody minded. But he is a tough politician. Whether he is Prime Minister material is a question which is yet to be answered. His competence with a brief is beyond question. For one man to be the supreme finance Minister in British politics for ten years is unheard of. Now he has to translate his perceived dour Scottish competence into a figurehead who can win another General Election.



One thing which will undoubtedly change, to the relief of many on the British Left, is the relationship with the United States, and in particular this current Administration. Oh there won't be a severing of ties and diplomats will be beavering away just as keenly in the background to ensure that Anglo American relations remain sound but Brown is keenly aware of the irritation felt by many Britons - and particularly those on the left of the Labour Party - at Tony Blair's effusive endorsement of every American political/military initiative, particularly under the Bush administration and the Republican Party.

In truth the British left distrusts all American politicians as being somewhat to the right of any concept of 'Left' known to Europe and as such was somewhat suspicious of Blair's love in with Clinton. But Bush and his neo cons have been the last straw.

Brown knows full well that his personal rating, important at the start of his Premiership, will go up several notches over here if he is seen to be less enthusiastic about embracing every American cause. I believe the Americans are well aware of this and may well expect a lot more British caution in future, particularly if attention is turned to the likes of Iran and North Korea.

The other factor of course is economic policy. Brown has been Chancellor for so long that his is the ONLY fiscal stamp on this government. Now he will have to let go of the reins or risk constantly losing Ministers if he insists on maintaining a hands on approach to the economy himself. These are interesting times.

How much of Brown's undoubtedly more socialist past still lingers in his soul and how much has he been pandering to the Blair 'New Labour' label. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Brown has not had to make many statements on national social policy. It will be interesting to see if, and by how much, he leaves Blair's shadow behind.

Tony Blair's supreme achievement

I have said many things about Tony Blair, much of it affected by my anger over the Iraq debacle, but I have to say that his supreme achievement as a politician has been the historic event that took place today, namely the re-constitution of the Northern Irish Assembly with the Protestant Rev Ian Paisley as First Minister and with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein as his deputy.




This is an achievement, after thirty years of bloody struggle in Northern Ireland, which is little short of miraculous and something which no one, even a year or so ago, could ever see happening. Paisley, the extreme Protestant, whose anti-Catholic marches nearly 40 years ago first compelled British troops to occupy the Province. A man whose hatred of the IRA is visceral. A man who raged long and hard, his body shaking with emotion against those 'Republican savages who had brought death and destruction to Northern Ireland'.




And now, serving with him, maybe the arch 'Republican savage', Martin McGuinness, former active IRA chief, whose personal involvement in acts of terrorism and murder, of Protestants and British soldiers too, is not in too much dispute. Alongside him in Stormont sits Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein senior spokesman, the 'brains' of Republicanism.



Of course this re-constitution is just the first tentative step to power sharing and the whole thing might fall apart before the first bill is discussed but simply to have got this far is amazing.

It is like, in American terms, Malcolm X agreeing to work with the Ku Klux Klan, so polarised have been their positions, so much hatred having existed between the two camps.

After thirty years of para military groups on both sides of the religious divide targeting their opposing communities, often with dreadful bloody consequences like the Omagh bombing, few would have seen this situation coming about. Since 1969 there have been over 1000 British soldiers killed in the province and nearly 2000 civilians on both sides of the religious divide

It was the first task Tony Blair set for himself and his Ministers on taking office in 1997 when the late Mo Mowlam was Northern Ireland Secretary and she and Blair pushed hard and often aggressively for what turned out to be the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. So much hope was placed in that agreement but thanks to the delicate politics of Northern Ireland and the deeply entrenched differences even within one side - the Protestant community deeply divided over whether any concessions should be made to the Irish Republican movement - the Good Friday agreement fell by the wayside and the Northern Irish Protestant leader, David Trimble, was eventually forced to resign.

The situation looked hopeless, particularly when the arch enemy of any truck with the Catholics, the Democratic Unionist Party and its leader Ian Paisley, won the highest share of the Protestant vote. It looked like a stalemate for Paisley refused to believe any promise an IRA man made.

But Blair, together with his ministers, and Bertie Ahern the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, worked hard, often at snails pace to get these two sets of glowering, hating politicians to the conference table. It often seemed a doomed unrewarding task, yet step by step, promise by promise, they succeeded in inching forward and overcoming fundamental and intense distrust to the point that has proudly been reached today. Northern Ireland has a new government with former arch enemies, Catholic and Protestant, Empire preservationists and One Ireland Republicans all sitting round the same table to bring a new enlightened and peaceful face to Northern Ireland.

And as he makes his announcement this week about resigning as Prime Minister, Tony Blair can justly and proudly look at the Stormont into which he has put so much work and say 'This was my finest hour'.

French vote for a new direction - or do they?

Now that the smoke has cleared, Nicolas Sarkozy has won the French Presidential election for, as I write, although the votes are still being counted, the Socialist Segolene Royal has already conceded defeat.

It is not a surprising result given that Mr Sarkozy has always been ahead in the polls but the French appear to have taken a giant leap out of the cocoon in which they have been embedded for many years. While Mme Royal promised more of the same - more state investment, protected salaries, higher pensions etc, Mr. Sarkozy has promised to make the French work harder, has said he will take away a lot of the protectionist benefits which France has enjoyed for many years, reduce taxation and get tough on immigration. In fact a classic right wing agenda.



The French, in a nutshell, have voted for someone they don't like all that much but whose ability inspires their confidence, while rejecting a woman whose views and personality they like a lot but in whom they have no faith.

Whether the 'wind of change blowing through France' will be quite as strong a gust as Mr. Sarkozy originally promised is highly doubtful. In reaching the magic figure on the second ballot he has had to wheeler deal, primarily with Francois Bayrou's centre party, and it is highly doubtful whether the French will be totally made to 'live in the real world' as he originally promised. It will be interesting to see if Mr.Sarkozy's performance, once he is in the Elysee Palace, matches his rhetoric on the campaign trail. My suspicion is that the innate, protectionist comfort zone in which France has long been wrapped will smother him as it has his predecessors.

'The best laid schemes o' Blair and Brown gang aft a-gley'

This morning Tony Blair is sitting in Downing Street looking at a Britain potentially in ruins. The local election results across the whole of the UK yesterday produced some dreadful reverses for the Labour Party though maybe not on the scale Blair himself had feared. However where the damage has been greatest has been where it carries most importance, in Scotland, which returned the Scottish National Party as the largest party in Scotland, to the Scottish Parliament. The SNP and its leader Alex Salmond have as their ultimate goal complete independence and they plan to hold a referendum on that issue within three years.



Blair must be thinking he is better off out of it, due to announce his resignation as Prime Minister next week, and what a bitter legacy he leaves behind. The man who came in on a wave of joyous enthusiasm ten years ago, who enhanced his image at the time of Princess Diana's death and at 911, is leaving his post as a reviled leader, the architect of British involvement in Iraq, the collapse of pension schemes and now the angry butt of doctors who see the National Health Service collapsing around them.

For his presumed successor, Gordon Brown, Blair's attempts to put a brave face on the electoral disaster will have a very hollow ring. "I don't think the results are that bad," warbled Tony, "I see them as a springboard for a future General Election victory."

Brown must be looking at those words with a baleful glare. Springboard for who he may well ask? Certainly not the Labour Party on the evidence of yesterdays vote. But for Brown, himself a Scot, the grim future must be north of Hadrian's Wall. In Brown's own parliamentary constituency, the SNP took the seat so in a General Election could the the Prime Minister-elect lose his own parliamentary seat? Its not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Worse is the situation regarding a future relationship with a Scotland led by the SNP. If Scotland does vote to rip up the Act of Union, then apart from the other consequences to the United Kingdom, all the Scottish Parliamentary seats at Westminster will, at a stroke, disappear. It is those seats which have kept the Labour Party in office. Without them the chances of a future Labour Government in what would be left of the UK would be almost nil.

Blair must be surveying the wreckage all around him and asking himself what went wrong. Ironically it is his reforming measure to allow the nations of Scotland and Wales a limited degree of independence through their own parliaments which has given the Scots the necessary confidence to vote for the possibility of one further step - complete independence. Rather than showing the gratitude through the polls that Blair had confidently expected from this measure, the voters of Scotland have kicked him in the teeth with it.




And the tartan disaster was not confined to the political effects on the UK. On a day when the most important Scottish election for over 200 years took place, Scottish officials decided to hold their Parliamentary and local council elections on the same day - using two different voting systems. The result was a disaster. In a nation of 2 million voters, 100,000 voting slips were declared invalid because of mistakes in filling them in. On a day of such importance, to attempt such a stupid cross pollination of two systems is absolutely disgraceful. Whether the lost votes would have meant a bigger victory for the SNP or Labour retaining control of Scotland we will never know, but it must have put the tin lid on an appalling night for Tony Blair and for the future of the United Kingdom.

We can't always pretend it's cricket!

The United States indicated yesterday, to the apparent distress of the British Foreign Office, that it may review the situation regarding British visitors to the United States within the 'Visa waiver' agreement. The U.S. has said that it may demand visas from British citizens who have any links to Pakistan.

This of course follows the trial and conviction of five men found guilty of planning massive explosions in Britain, all of whom had family links to Pakistan and all of whom went to Pakistan, ostensibly on family visits, but were trained by Al-Qaeda in the art of assembling ammonium nitrate bombs.



Naturally the cry has gone up over here of 'racism' and 'racial profiling' and, while nobody wishes to see any ethnic community made a scapegoat or singled out for suspicion, surely the United States has every right, given the recent evidence of hard line Jihadism among some British Muslims with Pakistan based connections, to protect its own citizens from harm from outsiders in any way it legally can.

It is a shame that such measures will appear to ostracise a section of Britain's Muslim community, most of whom offer no threat to anyone, but surely there comes a time when it is no longer appropriate to worry about sensitivity when there is a potential threat from some people who do have links to Pakistan and who are prepared to blow up tube trains, buses and shopping malls.

The alternative would seem to be that the Visa Waiver programme is withdrawn from British citizens altogether, and while that would seem to be 'fair and sporting' it would also be bloody ridiculous. The threat is clearly from a particular direction and it seems reasonable to me that the U.S. does what it can to minimise any potential risk from that area.

I am all for human rights, after all I am a committed member of Amnesty, but there are times and situations when I think the overall concern for human lives HAS to transcend any worrying about treading on peoples toes. This is not a cricket match where we all have to be jolly good chaps and be fair to everyone. It's a grim business of life and death and, until the British can give assurances to America that it has this extremist situation under control, I don't blame the United States one whit!

History repeating itself?

The scenes in Estonia this week, following the removal of a Russian war memorial statue from the city centre of Tallin, have grim echoes of the activities of the old Soviet Union.

The row blew up because the war memorial, a statue of a Red Army soldier apparently held sacred by those of Russian origin in Estonia, is to be moved to a military cemetery on the outskirts of Tallin. The Estonian authorities claim that its continued presence in the town centre was a constant reminder of former Soviet occupation while Russian speaking Estonians, backed by Russia itself, have claimed that the action is 'defiling the memory of the Russian war dead' and is a 'hostile act'.



The consequence was a riot instigated by Russian speaking Estonians and supported from Moscow. The Estonian embassy in Moscow is currently under siege from angry demonstrators and the issue has been blown up, both in the Russian press and parliament. Estonia has been deluged with attacks from the Russian based TV networks and the internet.

The Mayor of Moscow, presumably not acting without Vladimir Putin's blessing, has called for a boycott of all things Estonian ahead of the World War II victory celebrations on May 9th.

A permanent source of concern to the Estonian government is that well over a quarter of Estonia's inhabitants are of Russian origin , though many are denied citizenship because, say the Estonian authorities, they are families who were brought in during the years of Soviet occupation as technicians and military personnel. There is a genuine fear within the country of a riot or uprising, assisted by Moscow, which would justify the Russian government sending in 'help and assistance to its beleagured conmrades'

It may sound a far fetched fear, now that the Soviet Union is gone and the former Republics and satellite states have gained independence but it is well known that President Putin bitterly regrets the demise of the Russian empire. It is not too long back that both Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia saw the consequences of Russian 'assistance' justified by the actions of 'a few dissidents'.

Estonia is currently appealing to the European Union, of which it is part, for a concerted response to the current Russian psychological bullying of its small neighbour. Whether Estonia obtains the degree of support it wants is arguable. After all Russia is important to the EC both politically and economically and there will not be an enthusiastic rush to confront them.

But we should all be wary. The Russian bear may not yet be on the attack but its certainly waving its paws in angry fashion.