Chris Whiteside's Blog

"No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces." (Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke , cited with various slightly different translations into English and often shortened to "no plan survives contact with the enemy")

  I have not been able to verify this quote widely attributed to Aristotle, as there is no evidence that he ever wrote or said these precise words and they cannot be found in his surviving works. It is likely a modern paraphrase, or a sentiment loosely inspired by his teachings on politics and ethics.   Context: The quote is often linked to discussions on Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, where he argues that the goal of war should be peace, and that building a stable, virtuous society is the true aim of statesmanship. Origin: The quote has been traced back to a 1943 New York Times Book Review.  In Politics, Aristotle does argue that cities should be prepared for war, but that many nations fall because they do not know how to live in peace. So the sentiment does fit Aristotle's philosophy even though there is no evidence that he used this exact phrase,

There is an anecdote - which I have not been able to verify - that when the playwright George Bernard Shaw was making a speech, he was interrupted by a sudden and enthusiastic "loud peal of applause." Startled by the audience's reaction to what he considered a straightforward point, Shaw turned to the chairman and jokingly asked, " Did I say something stupid? " I've had a George Bernard Shaw moment today when I looked at the traffic stats for this blog. Normally it gets between a few hundred and a few thousand pageviews per day. Yesterday, for instance, it got six thousand. Tiny by comparison with a major website, but more than enough to make it worth the effort or writing it. Today so far this blog has had nearly 49,000 hits. It would, perhaps be inviting an insulting response to quote Shaw precisely but - Have I said something interesting? 

Twenty-six years ago I sang this to my wife at our wedding reception. Probably not quite as well as Bryn Terfel sings it in this recording. But it brings back wonderful memories.

Alastair Campbell - yes, the one who was Tony Blair's director of communications at the time of the invasion of Iraq, who took part in the preparation and release of the infamous author "dodgy dossier" justifying that invasion, one of the people who told us that the regime in Iraq could deploy Weapons of Mass Destruction inside 45 minutes, accused Donald Trump yesterday of  lying about Iranian progress towards getting nuclear weapons. Quite frankly, if either Donald Trump or Alastair Campbell said it was raining I would look outside and check before picking up my umbrella, but for Campbell to accuse someone of lying about what weapons a Middle Eastern country has to justify attacking them ... It has to be the biggest " Pot calling the kettle black " moment, not just of the year, not just of the decade, but of the century.

This was one of the questions that opposition leader Kemi Badenoch asked yesterday that seems to have every remaining Labour supporter from the Prime Minister downwards making personal attacks on her for supposedly making personal attacks. In my view this was a very pertinent question. Sadly it didn't get a clear answer, just the usual ad hominem response.

Madeline Grant has a piece in the Spectator about Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. You can read the whole thing at: Why is Keir Starmer pretending he’s a serious statesman? Here are a few extracts: "The situation in the Middle East inevitably preoccupied questions. Why, asked Mrs Badenoch, were the US allowed to defend British interests and personnel, but the RAF were not. The Prime Minister loves these moments. Never mind the fact that our denuded and depressed armed forces are now having to rely on – of all people – France to defend the sovereign territory which we cannot or will not in Cyprus, Sir Keir had his piece of paper in his hand, and he really believed that we are set for ‘following the due processes of international law in our time’.  He began by praising his own ‘clarity, purpose and… cool head’, which is quite something given that he goes the colour of a constipated flamingo every time a woman asks him a question he doesn’t like." "He would be guid...

 

"Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards." Thomas Sowell

Matthew Jeffery has a great piece on the Thatcher Legacy at Conservative Home. You can read the whole thing    here , but here are some extracts. " Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is now claimed by almost every strand of British politics. Conservatives invoke her as a model for renewal after defeat, Labour selectively borrows her language of growth and national confidence, and Reform UK increasingly argues that Thatcherism survives outside the modern Conservative Party altogether. At a moment when many centre-right voters feel politically displaced, the question has become unavoidable: would Margaret Thatcher, confronted with Britain’s political and economic circumstances today, have joined Reform UK? The conditions behind Reform’s rise are real. Britain faces sluggish growth, historically high taxation, regulatory expansion and declining confidence in governing institutions despite more than a decade of Conservative-led government. Voters shaped by Thatcher’s emphasis on enterpris...

 

A handy list of the sixteen issues on which Labour have broken their promises or reversed their policies. 1) Business rates on your local. The Conservatives held five Opposition Day Debates calling on the Labour Government to repeal its business rates hike and launched a Save the Local campaign, which was signed by 46,500 people, forcing the Government to U-turn on this tax. 2) Mandatory digital ID. The Conservatives do not believe in mandatory digital ID because it is against our values, puts our data at risk and will cost billions, which is why we led a campaign against the scheme which successfully forced the Labour Government to U-turn on it being mandatory. 3) A national, statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. Labour let down the victims of vile rape gangs by brushing the issue under the carpet. We called for a proper, targeted, national, statutory inquiry into rape gangs operating in this country – Labour voted against that three times before U-turning. 4) Winter F...

"By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it."  Eliezer Yudkowsky

Private citizens and journalists have the luxury of sitting on the fence and pointing out both that the Iranian regime is a ghastly bunch of murderers who have been oppressing the Iranian people and exporting terror around the world and that there are some very real issues with the attack on Iran by the USA and Israel. Governments don't have that luxury. Sir Keir Starmer's government has managed to infuriate both our US allies and those who don't agree with them by appearing to sit on the fence, condemning our country to irrelevance. As Andrew Neil wrote this morning, " Defence secretary John Healey is a decent man in a difficult job since, at a time of growing global threats, he’s part of a government that won’t spend more on defence.  He also picked the short straw by having to do this morning’s media rounds.  He was unable to answer a simple question put to him multiple times — do we or do we not support US/Israeli attacks on Iran?  This after the government had 24 ...

It is not all that often that you find a balanced and nuanced perspective on a political or religious issue in a tweet on X, formerly Twitter. Nevertheless I found one this morning. I rarely have as much sympathy and understanding for the position of people who have come down on the opposite side of an issue from me as I have over the attacks on Iran. (Brexit was another but let's not open that can of worms.) I explained yesterday  here , the position of the Conservative leadership, which I agree with. I quoted in that post the statements by Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel. I have read the opinion by the shadow attorney general on why he believes the attacks on Iran by the US and Israel were justified under international law, which I will repost on my blog shortly, and his argument convinces me, though I respect those who take a different view. The views in the rest of this post are my own and not necessarily those of the Conservative party. My view, on balance, is that the Iranian t...

  “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” — Charles Dickens , Great Expectations

Since the present regime in Iran came to power in 1979 and consolidated their position with a wave of executions, they have 🔴Violated the immunity of our legation in Tehran 🔴Abducted and assaulted British diplomats 🔴Pronounced a fatwa against a British citizen 🔴Kidnapped British naval personnel 🔴Seized a British tanker 🔴Backed Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas terrorism 🔴Supplied drones and missiles to Putin 🔴Sponsored at least 15 terror plots on UK soil  🔴Arrested British citizens and after a mockery of a trial, imprisoned them on patently false charges And after beginning their hold on power with a massacre of Iranian citizens suspected of not supporting the regime, they have over the last few years massacred men, women and children for protesting against the tyranny of the regime. I have no idea how many dissidents the current Iranian regime has butchered but there is plenty of evidence that it is a large number, almost certainly in the thousands. This is what Kemi Badenoch s...

Whitehaven and Workington Conservatives were out campaigning today, most of us in Workington but also some work done in Moor Row and there was also some mutual aid to colleagues in Penrth where there is a council by-election coming up. For all those who were out campaigning today, here is some music to relax to.  

 

In the days when the Green party regarded having a "leader" as too hierarchical, they had two "Principal speakers" and Darren Johnson held that post from 2001 to 2003. He was also a Green member of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2016, the party's candidate for Mayor of London in 2000 and 2004, and a Lewsham councillor. In December 2024 he resigned from the Green Party after 37 years' membership. On why most of the people who people who represent what the Green Party traditionally stood for have mostly, unlike himself, remained members as the party changed out of all recognition, he had this to say on X today: " With the Greens descent into ludicrous left-populism ("Zionism is racism" "abolish landlords") people ask me why other longstanding Greens have remained. After years in the wilderness, you've got to remember how intoxicating winning can be, even if your new activists are batshit. " Challenged in relation to yesterd...

Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them. As I've said many times before, we are a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. If you stir up grievance politics between groups based on religion or race, as Labour have done for decades, as Reform are seeking to do, and as the Greens have done successfully in this by-election, you are pitting neighbours against each other and you start to unravel the culture of tolerance that makes Britain great.  Our country is not broken, but this by-election showed that Labour, Reform and the Greens are trying very hard to break it. Labour trying to buy people off with more and more benefits spending. Reform telling people you can't be British if you aren't white. The Greens running a nasty, sectarian campaign while simultaneously wanting to legalise crack-cocaine. Clearly this election was not about who would be the best MP. But there was only one sensibl...

‘For a country to hand over its territory to another country free of charge could be construed as misplaced benevolence. To insist on paying for the pleasure suggests some sort of international humiliation fetish.’ Stephen Daisley , in a Telegraph article this week on Labour's Chagos Islands surrender deal.