helicopters

i love helicopters. i know nothing about them. i couldn’t tell a chinook from a lynx if your life depended on it. my love of them has nothing to do with knowledge or recognition – it might be the noise they make, it might just be that they have big whirly things on them or it might just be that they look oh so cool.
there isn’t an action movie that hasn’t been improved by the appearance of a helicopter or three. i am pretty sure that even citizen kane would have benefitted from at least one scene with a chopper in it. hell even stockhausen got in on the act with his helicopter string quartet.
helicopters were in the news again today.
during the last prime minister’s questions of the current parliament david cameron used some of his questions to talk about helicopters. or more accurately the lack of helicopters for the british armed forces in iraq and afghanistan. it was a clever ploy that continues cameron’s strategy of sowing doubt over gordon brown’s competency as prime minister and (as an added bonus) as chancellor. fortunately for cameron such attacks are aided by brown’s hubristic weakness of never being able to admit to a previous error. all too often brown has lost ground by not admitting there had been mistakes in the past, but like all governments errors will occur and labour under brown will provide the right solution. do that a couple of times and cameron would have been so wrong footed he would now be chasing the liberal democrats rather than looking like the next prime minister.
another outcome of never saying mea culpa is that you can’t go on the attack and ask: “well what would you do?” so in the case of the helicopters brown couldn’t very easily ask cameron where he planned on magicing up new helicopters from, especially as the prospective tory government is all about cutting spending. (unless the conservatives favourite helicopter maker, westland, still owe them a favour or two? i doubt it very much).
ask that of cameron and i think you have him in a corner. brown couldn’t and didn’t.
yet david cameron has given gordon brown the perfect election present – if he would but take it.
it is a winning strategy; it is a dyed in the wool, solid gold vote winner. much better than giving each soldier their own helicopter and the electorate their own pony.
oh i can hear you cry – what is it pat, just tell us.
it is simple. all gordon brown has to do is announce that he is radically cutting the british presence in afghanistan and he is going to do it on an accelerated schedule. eat your heart out mandelson, pure fucking political genius on my part. just a shame it is not going to happen.
there was a time when the ‘war on terror’ sort of made sense. not sure that holds true anymore. britain entered the war standing shoulder to shoulder with the usa, a show of faith, a show of trust, a show of common beliefs in what was right. it was the ‘special relationship’ writ large. all the relationship seemed to get us was a lot of dead squaddies and a severe financial crisis. in short: we got shafted.
with a change of prime minister and a change of president it was obvious some things would change. it seems that president obama doesn’t like gb – the country or the prime minister. the special relationship isn’t special any more. president obama is off courting other allies. let’s not look at this as a set back, instead let’s look at it as an opportunity. time to get out from under. time to reassess our place in the world and time to stop trying to punch above our weight on the international stage.
start with pulling the troops out from afghanistan. let the new american allies take up the slack, that is what allies do.
the benefit to gordon brown and new labour is that it shows that that can be daring, that they can make the difficult choices. if you are not fighting an unwinnable ‘war’ you are not spending lots of cash – all of which goes towards cutting that deficit. if you are not fighting the war your troops are not getting killed. while putting clear distance between us and the americans brown shows he is different from blair by not shadowing the americans while showing the rest of the world that we are not going to blindly follow the american lead on everything.
it is a vote winner.
best of all: if you don’t get elected as prime minister you have really put a spanner in the works for david cameron. come on gordon that alone has got to be worth it.

(coming soon: pat reforms the united nations and publishes his new diet book: ‘you are fat and it is his fault’.)