The Prime Minister, David Cameron – known to this blog as Mr Irresponsible – has stated that the recent killing by RAF drone strike of two UK citizens in Syria is lawful as it was an act of self-defence and there was no alternative.

So. Let me get this clear. It is illegal for agents of the UK government to execute people convicted in the UK courts for murder, treason (or even arson in Her Majesty’s Dockyards) since the death penalty for such crimes has been abolished; but it is legal to do so to someone outside the UK’s legal jurisdiction, someone who has not been so convicted, or even put on trial?

How is that exactly?

(And what is to stop the government declaring anyone so guilty and despatching a drone to get rid of them?)

I thought we (the so-called civilised law-abiding nations) were supposed to be better than them (the likes of ISIS, ISIL or, the description I believe they themselves abhor, Daesh.)

We have been here before, of course. The major difference is that Gibraltar is British sovereign territory and Syria is not.

Mind you. Abolition of the death penalty in the UK has been a dead duck since the Iranian Embassy siege.

Today, on the BBC’s Reporting Scotland, there was a clip of David Cameron, aka Mr Irresponsible, saying that he was to blame for many things (well you’re right in that at least, Dave) but that Labour’s collapse* in Scotland wasn’t one of them.

Really, Dave? How un-self-aware can anyone get?

It’s got nothing to do with the speech you made on the day after the Independence Referendum where you slapped down those who had just voted to remain in the UK with a, “We don’t care about you, we only care about England,” attitude? Could anything have been more likely to enrage both those who had voted no and those for yes? A clearer demonstration that Westminster politicians just don’t get it as far as Scotland is concerned would have been harder to find. To anyone who knows Scots what response could have been expected other than a rise in support for the SNP (who ought to have been set back for perhaps decades by the rejection of their key purpose for existence?)

I suppose it could all be part of a diabolical (yes, I know it means of the Devil) plan to undermine the Labour party in the UK as a whole but I don’t believe Cameron actually is as cunning as all that. (His sidekick Gideon Osborne, aka George, is another matter, though.) I realise the Tories have more than something of the night about them but I doubt in their wildest dreams could they have deliberately conceived and implemented a coherent, rather than accidental, strategy to reduce the influence of Labour on the Westminster Parliament.

Labour having conspicuously failed over the many years of my lifetime to protect Scots from governments they have not voted for, many people seem to have come round to the view that only a large bank of SNP MPs at Westminster will ensure that Westminster cannot treat Scotland off-handedly.

So yes, Dave. I do blame you.

BTW: I suspect that Labour won’t lose quite so many seats in Scotland as the polls at present predict. There are still many “always been Labour” voters around.

So farewell then 2014, a year which promised to be the most important in Scotland’s history since 1707, but turned out to be more like 1746.

My abiding memory of the referendum year will not be the referendum itself but of the morning after; when we Scots discovered that, far from being about Scotland, the process we had all been through for the previous eighteen months had in fact been, instead, about England, when Mr Irresponsible said his EVEL¹ piece. (Paragraphs 19 and 20.)

My first reaction – apart from thinking it was the most spectacular case of missing the point I’d ever witnessed – was that they will just never value us. This was the time to heal, to welcome the result as a coming together, a reaffirmation of what keeps the UK united, a sense of sharing and mutual worth. But what we got instead was an assertion of self-importance, a rejection and dismissal. A Thatcherite Prime Minister telling us that he was in charge and now he’d got what he wanted we didn’t matter any more, that he didn’t care, had in fact, despite his bluster, never cared.

It was only seeing the clip again a few months later that the comparison occurred to me. It was like an abusive husband, told by his wife after a period of consideration that she had decided she had too much invested in the marriage to give it up lightly and was willing to stick with it, immediately turning round and blackening her eye again.

I know not everyone in England agrees with him. Let’s hope they vote accordingly in the General Election in May.

¹English Votes for English Laws.

I see our esteemed Prime Minister David Cameron (aka Mr Irresponsible) has put his foot in it again.

In what sort of a world can the UK be governed by a man who has no notion of the need to refrain from comment on trials or the people involved in them while they are still taking place?

It seems that an outbreak of sanity has occurred in the UK Parliament with its vote against military action in Syria.

Now, chemical weapons are horrible things (even if you are just as dead being killed by high explosive or shell fragments or blast or a bullet; it is difficult to see a moral difference) but I fail to see how attacking Syrian government forces can make life better for the average Syrian even if responsibilty for the use of such weapons were to be established beyond doubt.

Not to mention the wider implications. Pour oil on to a fire, why don’t you? Bombing yet another mainly Muslim country will only encourage those Muslims who have a grievance against the UK already.

[And don’t forget there are many reasons for that grievance. I noted only yesterday that British forces were involved in killing locals in Iraq in the 1920s. This followed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which laid the path for the eventual Jewish takeover of most of Palestine. Then there was the overthrow of Mossadeq in the early 1950s. The collusion with Israel over Suez in 1956, the Suez invasion itself. The illegal invasion, on totally spurious pretexts, of Iraq in 2003. This is just those instances of UK intervention which impact on the Middle East. (A term which is itself anglocentric.)]

Quite how adding in another external faction to what is a civil war in Syria would help in resolving the situation there is also beyond me.

Just because people say something must be one doesn’t mean you can do anything you like.

Mr Irresponsible (aka David Cameron) has once more shown himself up to be a blustering bully. I suspect his enthusiasm for miltary intervention in Syria is that he believes sending in the armed forces helped both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to be re-elected. (A belief in which he is probably mistaken.) What he hasn’t learned is that the Iraq invasion – or, more accurately, its aftermath – poisoned the opinion of most British people against the assertions of Government spokespeople and Prime Ministers over the reasons for using troops and weaponry.

Military action against Syria could be like stirring up a hornet’s nest with a stick. There is no telling what the consequences would be.

A better response to use of chemical weapons, or any atrocity, would be to make sure that anyone responsible for what are considered war crimes is held to account by the international community. This would mean instant arrest should they stray outside whatever jurisdiction is keeping them safe from it and then arraignment before an international court. This stricture ought of course to apply to anyone, from whatever country, not just those our politicians say they don’t like.

And as to the effects of chemical weapons it might be best to deluge Syria with kits containing antidotes to the chemicals likely to be used – which would render their deployment pointless.

It wouldn’t stop the killing though.

I’m afraid this has been a somewhat unfocused rant. I can’t see a quick way out of the present Syrian imbroglio, the two sides seem too far apart for that.

Civil wars tend to be intractable. Intervention in them needs to have a purpose beyond, “Something must be done.” I didn’t think any of our politicians – least of all Mr Irresponsible – had enough wisdom to see beyond such simplicities. Parliament has at least resolved not to do more harm.

For the moment anyway.

This week, talking about the EU budget, our Prime Minister, David Cameron, (aka Mr Irresponsible) used the phrase, “times it by.”

In today’s Guardian, on page 43, in the puzzle section (there doesn’t seem to be a webpage with this content) it claims he said on Newsnight that the Stafford hospital scandal was caused by “a serious failure on behalf of the trust board.”

He’s supposed to have been educated – expensively educated – at one of the best schools in the country. It would claim to be the best, I’m sure.

Yet it has unaccountably failed to teach him to speak English.

So much for Eton as a beacon of excellence.

If you take a look at this (apparently non-embeddable*) video of BBC 1’s Last Tango In Halifax (broadcast on 4/12/12) from just before 45 minutes in – the really approprate bit is from 46:40 to 47:00 – you’ll hear a laugh out loud summation of Mr Irresponsible, aka David Cameron.

It was all the more surprising to see and hear this sort of thing in an otherwise uncontroversial piece of cosy prime time TV.

* Edited to add:- I’ve found the embed code now, so here it is.

George Entwistle has resigned as Director-General of the BBC.

Why?

He wasn’t personally responsible for the output of any news programmes which the BBC has broadcast. And nor should he have been. It is not the Director-General’s job to second guess every jot and tittle of the BBC’s output.

The BBC (or more particularly Newsnight) has now been damned for not broadcasting allegations of sexual abuse (in the Jimmy Savile case) and now for broadcasting such allegations (against a Senior Tory.)

What message does this send to the BBC news outlets? Keep your head down. Which I believe is precisely the point. No-one in government likes the BBC poking its nose into their business. This is true for governments of either stamp. It was Greg Dyke of the BBC, not anyone in government, who resigned over the David Kelly affair.

And so again. How come in all this saga has the only person to go been at the BBC?

And do you see any other news organisations beating themselves up over mistakes they have made (News International I’m thinking of you) as the BBC does?

David Cameron (aka Mr Irresponsible) said on ITV’s This Morning last week that he didn’t want a witch hunt (of people who happen to be gay.) I agree that witch hunts are unedifying. But a witch hunt of the BBC has been exactly what has occurred since the Savile allegations broke.

When he appointed Andy Coulson to his staff at Number Ten Cameron himself made a much greater error than any George Entwistle might have. This put Mr Cameron in the frame of a scandal that reached into the heart of British society as it involved the possible (nay, probable) suborning of the police by news editors and journalists – possibly the most egregious of activities in a democracy. I have yet to see Mr Cameron resign over his association with that.

To the BBC I say; stop going along with the news agenda of those who have it in for you. To those who attack it I say; you may not miss it when it’s gone, but plenty will.

I was amused when I heard that Mr Irresponsible, aka David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, had reshuffled half his cabinet.

The same thing was done by Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in 1962 when it was dubbed Night of the Long Knives in comparison with the Nazi purge of 1934.

(Macmillan may or may not have uttered the phrase, “Events, dear boy. Events,” under which I have categorised this post.)

Whatever, the Night of the Long Knives incident offered his Labour opponent Harold Wilson a brilliant line when he talked about this some time later. Wilson said, “I remember the then Prime Minister sacking half his Cabinet – the wrong half, as it turned out.”

I wonder if Ed Miliband can somehow reuse that one.

Well, this says it all.

Mr Irresponsible (see here for previous posts) aka David Cameron – the Prime Minister of the UK! – has left his child behind in a pub.

Can you really trust your country to this man?